This was such a fun activity! We’ve been studying nests this past week through my daughter’s Kindergarten curriculum, and so when I ran across Day 12’s “Baby Nest” activity in our Mother Goose Time curriciulum, I was so excited how well it would flow into our lesson plan for the day.

Here is a glimpse into the Teacher’s Guide. I love that it’s so visually appealing, as well as practical and educational. It doesn’t have to be, but the extra effort the development team puts into making the Teacher’s Guide more attractive is a huge investment in the parents and teachers that use them. It’s all the attention to the small things and their diligence to continually approve upon their product that I love about Mother Goose Time!

It’s hard to tell by my lacking photography skills, but as you can see, most of the materials were provided for the activity. (Thank you, Mother Goose Time!) I just needed to supply the glue and scissors.

We used plastic eggs to create little birds.

Look at that sweet face! And of course, the baby bird as well.

Natalie wanted an excited (or possibly horrified) baby bird.

Bonus: See that rolling cart in the background. Again, hard to tell from my photography skills, but each tray is labeled according to four different categories that pretty much encompass the reusable materials that I get each month in our MGT boxes. Thanks to the awesome tip at the end of Leslie Falconer’s Introduction video, we are able to have our supplies accessible and easily managed in our living space. As you can see, our manipulatives drawer at the every bottom is pretty much overflowing. And I love that because that is Peter’s go-to place whenever Natalie and I are going a little bit longer than he would like with a topic. He can jump down, grab some math blocks (or little trains like we just got in November’s box themed On The Go).

The baby birds were hungry, so we decided to feed them. We had been given so many different seeds in this month’s materials that it was easy to make this an addition to our activity, providing an opportunity to role play with the kiddos.

And once they were finished eating, we taped them close, and voila! Instant baby bird shaker.

We added feathers to their heads, and then settled them down in their nests, made from a brown paper sack, cut in half and rolled down. The top half that we cut off was then cut into pieces to represent the extra twigs and other materials that birds may use to line their nests. (SUCH a  great application to all we’d be learning about nest building.)

Peter’s happy little bird, for now.

Peter’s bird didn’t stay happy for long. He decided that he wanted to pick off the eyes, and then of course wanted to change his mind and put them back on. They didn’t want to reapply very easily, and so I scrapped off what I could of the adhesive residue and pulled out my black sharpee. I added some eyes over the smile.

Peter resisted and said that the bird wasn’t happy anymore. So I turned the bird around to the back, added another pair of eyes, accompanied by a frown.

So all of a sudden, we had this Jekyl and Hyde action going on, and our little bird was sudden bi-polar.

So that was a fun little creative path we took today to reinforce what we had been learning about nests and birds this past week. And we have these cute little shakers to continue to play with and remind us of the fun morning.

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