Spring has sprung in the forest! The birds have been singing with us every morning and the children have been eager to learn about them. To start our explorations about birds we just started to help the children pay attention and wonder about them. We created an exploration box with objects representing birds and explored these objects for many mornings at our forest circle meeting while also recording the children’s questions and ponderings.

Every morning birds emerged in some area of our morning, and the children started to become very interested in the colours of birds. They started to engage with Robert Batemans book “Backyard Birds”. Every day at the painting station Robert Batemans book was set up beside the paint and children created beautiful paintings of birds. Next week we will visit the Robert Bateman art gallery to explore his bird paintings.

We took the children’s questions and created a wall of their questions/wonderings. We called this our “Wonder Wall”, an idea we got when visiting some very engaging classrooms in Vancouver recently.

To answer our questions about birds we started to make a bird wall in the classroom. In the forest the children started their research by putting sticky notes on the pages of bird books where they found something they wanted to learn about. Lisa would then read that page to them, than they drew what they learned from their research. These were then placed our bird wall in the classroom. In another group in the forest the children started to create a big book about what they were learning about birds. They made many pages including a title page, types of birds, bird food, predator/prey and nests.

The children have been working to answer their questions from the wonder wall and move it to our bird wall. They have used each other, books, observations, people at home, TV shows and theory making to start to answer their bird questions.

Here are some examples of their questions:

Why is the raven all black? So its predators cannot find it

Why do birds have webbed feet? To help them swim.

Why does the eagle have a sharp beak? So it can rip its food apart. It has a curve on it.

How are birds able to fly? They have hollow bones.

(Written by Erin Van Stone, Nature K ECE)