project journal, who's keeping track of weeks anymore?

Mark it up as just another one of those things that I've been ridiculously behind on, but we pretty much wrapped up our bird study a few weeks back. Like in early April. Unfortunately, what was to be our cumulative event-- a migratory bird festival at the National Zoo that I was absolutely psyched to go to-- got rained heavily on, and hence our bird study just kind of fizzled out. I have visions of compiling all of the drawings, charts, photos and other pieces of documentation into a Bird Study album. On another day. The best part to include will be these posts, of course!

So, one last time, here's a recap of our final birding days. Although, I'm proud to say that even though the 'official' study has come to an end, the kids are still as excited about, aware of and enthralled by the birds we see everywhere. That is definitely the best part of project learning!

*I often have NPR on the kitchen radio throughout the day, and at lunch one day we were listening to the Kojo Nnamdi show. How excited Red became when the Backyard Birdwatching segment came on, and she took right after her mommy by getting all worked up and talking back to the folks on the radio. I emailed in her comments, but alas, we weren't picked for the air. (Which I really thought we would be, as the last email read at the end of the segment... they went with something about a woman's cat, if I remember correctly... we got gypped, I say.)

*Red spent a morning just playing by herself and telling these elaborate stories involving bird characters-- you know the kinds of stories that kids make up as they go along and there are lots of 'ands' and never really any kind of appropriate punctuation or pauses or completed thoughts and they just keep rambling on and on and on... So, I asked her if she wanted me to write down one of her stories, which was turned into a printed and illustrated book by the end of the morning. I Saw a Robin in my House is a rollicking 4-page book with lots of vertical lines for illustrations. Very nice.

*We also assembled a mini-book highlighting the individual bird body parts using a file from a Montessori-teacher-friend. It's still a book that sits on our bookshelf, right next to that latest homemade release.

*We went back to the Watkins Nature Center, spending some more time outside with the large predatory birds, including a fantastic-for-a-then-two-year-old observational sketch of a black vulture. (Unfortunately, it's so lightly drawn in pale colored pencil, but here it is nonetheless.)



*The very cool thing is that at the same regional park as the nature center is the fantastic Old Maryland Farm. Talk about a neat and accessible place-- we were right up front with turkeys, ducks, some amazingly funky chickens, and peacocks and peahens. They have other animals as well, but these kiddos were so, so focused on these different types of birds. Seriously, check out these funky chickens!








*I also created a Memory-style matching game using bird photos from that previously mentioned Montessori-teacher friend (thanks C!!). Red eventually got the hang of the game, and other than a few attempts at flipping more than two cards on a turn, we can play a straight-through game of bird memory. We've even adapted it to play "Go Birdwatching" for a few hands!

*We spent a time talking about the concept of tallying, and Red's got a kicking sense of one-to-one correspondence developing in that little brain of hers. So we made a tally sheet and sat on my 'mommy bench' in the yard and counted birds for about 15 minutes. Each bird meant one tally mark on the page, which Red declared would be circles, her favorite shape. Check it out--



I think that's about it. We should have been ending with a huge bang full of pics from the Zoo's Bird Fest, but such is life. We'll be putting that album together sometime soon (as in, before she goes to kindergarten), but we've officially finished our first project together! And, if you can believe it, we've already embarked on number two-- expect to read about our Bug Project in a few (or more) weeks!

Handing out completely useless awards to anyone who actually made it this far,