project journal, week 2 & 3

Well, approximately, as much as week 1 was about the length of a week, or a little more. For generalities, we'll call this week 2 and 3, but I'll just document here the stuff we did through the end of March. I continue to be amazed at both Red and Pudge's involvement in this-- yes, even the 1 year old! I have found that the beauty of a really successful study often lies in time and place, and this bird study has been perfect for us in our area and at this time of year. This is going to be a long one, so if this kind of thing just doesn't float your boat, check back later for some other random post.

I figure it's easiest to break it down by bullet points:

• I asked Red to think about some things she wants to investigate about birds, and this is what she came up with:

1. I want to think about what birds do.
2. How they fly their wings?
3. How they build their nests?
4. Why do some feathers come off?
5. I'm curious about beaks.

• When I asked her how she thought we could figure some of these things out, she responded, "We can write them down and look in the information books!" We have been reading LOTS of those information books, (they continue to frequently trump story books when we read before nap each day!) and we've definitely covered the nests and the beaks.

• We filled our bird feeder with the sunflower seeds we bought at the pet store, and it's slowly gaining popularity with our local nuthatches, chickadees and mourning doves. Red doesn't have much patience for sitting quietly to wait for birds to come, so when we go outside to watch for birds, she's usually off playing by the time they make their way to the feeder. But, I have had several opportunities to quietly watch while the kids play nearby and have been able to point birds out to the kids. We also hung up a little bird house that we bought at the store, but we still have no tenants so far.

• We followed a suggestion from one of Red's favorite information books of all, A Nest Full of Eggs, by putting out some small pieces of shredded newspaper and yarn for robins to collect as they build their nests. I don't think we had any takers on that so far, but that really didn't seem to phase Red all that much.

• Also when we've been playing outside, we've been trying to identify the bird songs we hear, and Red independently identified both a chickadee and a robin! Then I brought my little laptop outside and we confirmed the sounds using the FANTASTIC site- Learn Bird Songs!

• As a whole family we visited the Watkins Nature Center, which has several large birds in captivity (all but one because of injuries that prevent them from surviving in the wild). All of the kids spent time observing the barn owls, barred owls (really, they should have picked names that don't sound so much alike!), the black vulture, the turkey vulture, and the cooper's hawk. They also have an outdoor feeder area where many songbirds were brave enough to visit even though my crew was cheerfully (and loudly, of course) collecting pebbles nearby. They had a fantastic set of bird identification cards at the observation window inside with which Red was able to recognize more birds than I expected! (And later when we were sitting around outside back at home that beautiful afternoon, Red pointed to our feeder and yelled, "I see a nuthatch!") Some of Red's observations from the nature center trip:

1. We saw a red-winged blackbird on the sign.
2. The BIG bird had a black wing.
3. I liked seeing the bird sketches inside- the stretching ones. (see photos below to figure this one out)

the adorable barn owls

JAM and Red on the 'stretching' birds


Red and Pudge sitting still for ONE moment by the outdoor feeding area


Red watching closely as an employee cleaned out the vulture's cage


the fam at lunch with the birds

• Red and I were both equally as excited to see a downy woodpecker on a tree in our yard-- Pudge was excited, too, but he's a pretty happy kid most of the time anyway. :) One thing that is pretty remarkable about him-- one day we walked down our street just a bit because we could hear a huge group of red-winged blackbirds in some nearby trees. As we stood under all those chattering birds, Pudge yelled, "Birds!" (in his baby-articulation which is virtually impossible to transcribe), and I responded, "Yes, lots of birds!" And then he shocked me by saying a more-than-one-word-thing, "Up! Tree!" I was beside myself with joy at how even he was developing his skills in relation to this project!

• More birds that we saw while out and about one day: some type of hawks flying over the playground along with a pair of mockingbirds diving at and chasing them and cardinals singing their bloody heads off.

• We continued to explore different online resources, including nest cams on the Cornell site (we liked the bluebirds one from Texas), and together we took a Bird Brain Challenge on there as well (which I built using mostly birds that I knew Red had been exposed to).

• Red enjoys painting at the easel, and I suggested that she could paint a picture of one of her favorite types of birds. Guess what she picked? Yup, that old red-winged blackbird, but unfortunately, I had no black paint! So, she settled for a robin, since she determined that she would need brown, red, and yellow paints, which we all had. I let her paint in her own non-representational 2-year-old way at first, and then I suggested that she could look at a picture of a robin in a book to see what parts she wanted to paint. While we looked at a book illustration that she had chosen, I gave verbal suggestions about the shapes of the bird parts and asked her to think about where the parts should go on the paper. With only my verbal assistance and suggestions, she painted her very first representational picture, which now proudly hangs in our kitchen in a handy IKEA frame we had:

Wondering about the THREE lines below? Well, two are legs of course, but the third is "the poopy coming out of his butt!" Oh yeah, she's a preschooler, alright!

• More artwork was to follow, much less representational and more explorative (first experience with glue!)-- a collage with the feathers we've collected from our yard and a watercolor of a red-winged blackbird, because we did have black paint in that form:

• After dinner one night, we trekked out to the playground by our town's man-made lake, so of course we had to spend some time checking out the birds in the water! Along with the usual mallard ducks and Canada geese, I spotted one lone wood duck hanging out with the crew. I pointed it out to the kids, and when we got home later that evening, Red went right to the information basket and pulled out a book with a wood duck gracing the cover, "This is what we saw! A wood duck!"

Whew! That documents the rest of our bird project experiences for March. I don't know if anyone out there really has any interest in reading gigantic posts like this, but I have had a great time over the last hour putting this all together-- this will come in handy as we put together some type of book or poster to culminate the study, and it simply brings me joy to see all that the little ones are really experiencing! I think it would be best to not wait so long between posts, since I already have several items that have already happened that will get put into round three!

With our eyes on the skies,