Outside in the garden the children will often stop what they are doing and point up to the sky when they hear a plane, helicopter or noisy birds flying overhead! We take this as a learning opportunity and ask the children questions about what they have seen. ‘Where is the aeroplane going?’ or ‘how many birds can you see?’ This is great way to extend their learning and get them thinking about the answers.
This interest in the world around them led to this week's activity which was to take the children on a bird hunt in the garden. The children had a clipboard and pen and were able to tick which birds they had spotted in the garden. This led to lots of questions and chatter about birds, such as where do they live? How do they make their nests? What do they eat? My favourite question from one child was ‘how do eggs get into the nests?’ and another child answered them by saying ‘birds fly down and pick the eggs from the ground!’
After the children had found all the birds, the tuff tray was set up for them to use natural materials such as sticks and straw to build their own nests. We had pretend birds and eggs for imaginary play to go in the nests. Children were encouraged to count the eggs and describe their size ‘big’, ‘small’ and ‘medium’ and colour in the eggs. The children also tried to encourage birds to land in the garden by putting bread out for them and had binoculars ready to see which birds landed.
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