Last week my little boy got so interested with birds that I have to whip out my bird-related resources to give him a unit study of birds. As you all know, I don’t have a printer yet and I just have to reuse old materials which I already have.
BOOKS. Each day, I TRY to read him books. I use to schedule it in the morning, but we aren’t religious with it. There were times he wanted to do lots of play pretend in the morning and would ask me to read him books in the afternoon, and vice versa. Since I don’t have any access to our library yet, I just selected books which has “birds” on it for our theme last week.
3 PART CARDS. We love these cards! Oh and it’s tempting to hoard them Montessori Print Shop! My son participated well when we did the Parts of a Bird. To show him the parts aside from the control cards, I used our bird figures to point to him certain parts described in the cards. He loves it! And for a much understanding, I have to make a comparison of the bird parts and his body parts. He understands well that he doesn’t have a tail :) He keeps reminding me of that.
What we normally do with nomenclature cards after discussing each part is to match the picture cards and the labels to the control cards. My son loves matching cards that we did this activity in 3 straight days together with the Lifecycle of a Chicken.
LIFE CYCLE OF A CHICKEN. Chicken are birds too, right? LOL. These cards were homemade, when I still have the time and energy to make nomenclature cards for personal use. And then I realized that it’s eating much of my time, so rather than spending a full day of photoshoping I decided that it would be wise to purchase ready-made.
And he asked me where’s the part that we have to eat the chicken. LOL.
My homemade bird puzzle :) My son wants to add a goggly eye but strangely I couldn’t find them at that time. I found this puzzle pattern (together with other animal patterns) in this site. Boy, I’m so glad they’re sharing it on the web!
GRID GAME. My son can’t get enough of this game. We tried this game last year but he was more interested with the dice than the game itself. But this time, I was glad that he got over with his fascination with the dice and participated well in the game. He can identify the number of dots in the dice long before we did this, so he didn’t find it difficult at all reading the dots. He loves putting “candies” on the chicken.
SIZING. I got it from here.
To be honest, I wanted to do more with this subject but sadly, I couldn’t provide additional resources. So next time we revisit this, I might add the following:
- Bird matching game.
- Own Exotic Birds and discuss each birds, how they differ, and probably make control cards to match the object with the card.
- Create bird’s nest for crafting.
- Outdoor bird watching. It rained the whole week so we were not able to bird watch.
- Paint birds.
But even though we miss a few activities, it was still fun theme to explore!
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Wow! Such wonderful, inspirational ideas. I've been day dreaming of spring weather and bird watching so I put together a Bird Unit Study post and featured your ideas in the post. Here's the link if you want to check it out: http://mymontessorimoments.com/2012/02/20/bird-unit-study/
ReplyDeleteHi I purchased the bird unit and thought the parts of the bird puzzle would be in it. How can I get that?
ReplyDeleteThank you
Susan
Hi! I do not sell the bird puzzle seen in the picture, but you can get it here on this site: https://thelittlelist.wordpress.com/m-o-n-t-e-s-s-o-r-i/
ReplyDeleteThank you!