Nature Study: Birds

Now that Daniel and Lydia are schooling, I get to re-read all the wonderful books I read to my big kids some years ago. I'm having so much fun strolling down this literary memory lane!

For nature study, we're reading The Burgess Bird Book for Children.

Are you familiar with Thornton Burgess? Oh you simply must get to know him! He knows all there is to know about animals (he also wrote The Burgess Animal Book for Children, and The Burgess Seashore Book for Children) and he's a great storyteller. These are no boring field books, oh no! They are story books! What more interesting way could there be to learn about animals?!

So, we read about Jenny Wren's house being taken over by Bully the Sparrow (Boy was she mad! But really, what did she expect? You just can't take off for six months and think your house will still be unoccupied when you get back!) and we're learning about their habitats, their appearance, their personality, and their diets.

While I read about the Sparrow, for instance, I have a picture of a sparrow pulled up on the computer for the kids to draw and color.

Then we jump over to this website and listen to the bird songs. This has been an extra dose of fun that I didn't do with the big kids. I hit play on the bird song and suddenly we realize that we are greeted with wrens every morning and just didn't know it!