Every January the RSPB has it's Schools Birdwatch (Jan 18th - Feb 1st) - if you visit their website they have many lovely ideas that you could use in school. This year they are also doing a Little Schools Birdwatch which again has many good ideas to use in your class. I tend to do the Big Garden Birdwatch which is next weekend so that I can set it as homework - not just the bird watching but also as data handling revision of the information they collect. I think that it's also important that the children realise that birds need our help to survive in bad weather such as the snow we've just had and I've been encouraging them to leave out food.
The Year 3 classroom has windows that look out over our school meadow, this means that I can hang feeders from the trees which can clearly be seen from the class. I've not been able to get into the meadow recently with all the snow but finally last weekend I stocked up the feeders and put out many of those half coconut things.
We're now starting to get the birds back and we often have 3 or 4 male and female pheasants sitting on the wall staring at us all in class! I'm hoping that next week we'll have several more species of bird for us to identify and I'll have a different bird each day as background on the IWB to help them to be able to recognise the birds more easily.
So, onto science. Our science topic this half term is 'materials' whch fits very nicely with making bird food! We use lard, cheese, raisins and sunflower seeds and put them in a plastic pot with string for a hanger.
Lard is malleable and soft, the plastic pot is waterproof and strong, the string is flexible and strong, we need scissors to cut the string - hard, sharp and strong, cheese is for protein and if you use cheese string it's flexible and malleable and the raisins provide sugar and again are very malleable!
It's a great activity to apply their learning in this science topic, it's also fun - try washing your hands after making balls of lard!....and it's very useful as the birds get a tasty ball of food!
The Year 3 classroom has windows that look out over our school meadow, this means that I can hang feeders from the trees which can clearly be seen from the class. I've not been able to get into the meadow recently with all the snow but finally last weekend I stocked up the feeders and put out many of those half coconut things.
We're now starting to get the birds back and we often have 3 or 4 male and female pheasants sitting on the wall staring at us all in class! I'm hoping that next week we'll have several more species of bird for us to identify and I'll have a different bird each day as background on the IWB to help them to be able to recognise the birds more easily.
So, onto science. Our science topic this half term is 'materials' whch fits very nicely with making bird food! We use lard, cheese, raisins and sunflower seeds and put them in a plastic pot with string for a hanger.
Lard is malleable and soft, the plastic pot is waterproof and strong, the string is flexible and strong, we need scissors to cut the string - hard, sharp and strong, cheese is for protein and if you use cheese string it's flexible and malleable and the raisins provide sugar and again are very malleable!
It's a great activity to apply their learning in this science topic, it's also fun - try washing your hands after making balls of lard!....and it's very useful as the birds get a tasty ball of food!
What a great project. There are so many lessons that can be learned by watching and feeding birds. Thanks for sharing your ideas.