For the Birds ~ Book and Activities for the Week of February 21st

One of the things I love most about homeschooling is the freedom to change things up when a change in circumstances arises.

We had every intention of participating in The Great Backyard Bird Count that started today. But, with us taking off 9 days of school because of the snow, and then working so hard this whole week while going to the state capitol building yesterday and having a Valentine's party today, I just didn't feel like we were prepared enough.

And, next week our letter-of-the-week is "O". So we are going to study Observation. One of the main ways we will study that topic is by doing an unofficial backyard bird count each day next week. We are going to re-watch Your Backyard  by Crowe's Nest Media, to familiarize ourselves with the different birds in our region, and then spend 15 minutes each day observing the birds in our backyard and taking pictures of them. Then we will sit down on Friday and do an official count of the different birds that visited us. Hopefully by doing this we will be completely prepared to participate in The Great Backyard Bird Count next year.

Observing birds will be only one form of observation we will do.

Our focus book this week will be Backyard Detective: Critters up Close written and illustrated by Nic Bishop.

I bought Brynne a little bug study kit and we will collect some bugs and weeds and other things and observe them with a magnifying glass. (In fact she already found it and is using it as I type.)

On one sunny day next week we will do some observations of the sun by making a sundial and participating in the activities found here.

And our final observations will be with our senses. We will use this hard candy and paper sack activity found here.

So, if you are following along in our For the Birds study, next week will be changed up a bit with an emphasis on observation. I am really looking forward to this set of lessons!

Then next week we will move on to the focus book United Tweets of America and will study the different state birds. Because Brynne enjoyed the little amount of study we did on Oklahoma last week getting prepared for our trip to the capitol, we will do some further studies on Oklahoma by using some children's library books:

Feel free to join us in a study of your state!