Time For Tots: A Day of Birds

This week we actually did our Time For Tots day today. We usually do our Time for Tots days on Thursdays and then I post about it the following Wednesday. Last Thursday came and went so did it today--which is why this is posting so late.

I have been asked a few times where I get the ideas for my days. Sometimes it is inspired by a book, sometimes something I see online, this time by a television show. Lucas has recently discovered Dinosaur Train on PBS and LOVES the show. And well, something we both learned from the show that all birds are dinosaurs. And after learning this fact, Lucas and Alex started playing birds, i.e. building nests, pretending to be the eggs hatching. So I decided to base the Time for Tot's day on their recent fascination.

We began by talking about nests.. and well nest starts with the letter N you know.

Lucas using his camera to take a picture of his work... do you think all my picture taking influences him much?

We then did a worksheet with pictures of different animals. The name of the animal was under the picture with one or two letters missing. Usually the first letter would be missing, so Lucas would sound out the word and write in the missing letter. The kids then circled the birds on the page. I was so happy with how well he did this.
And then we made our own birds. A couple of days after I thought of the theme for this week, Holly from 504 Main showed how to make some super cute bird decorations. And I thought, we can do that. She even has a template you can download and instructions, which can all be found here.

I printed out the pattern on card stock and then the kids traced the pattern onto scrapbook paper. I had to help Alex trace a little bit, but Lucas was able to do this on his own. They then cut out their pieces.Alex loves cutting, she does it all the time, so she is a pro with scissors and did not need any help cutting out. I helped Lucas with the curvy parts.

I didn't read the instructions very clearly and forgot to draw 1 set of the pattern on the wrong side of the paper.. so instead of having a three-dimensional bird, we ended up making two birds. Which became the mommy and daddy bird.

We then talked about nests and what things birds find and use to make their nests and then made nests of their own.

We used play dough to form the nests and the kids just added lots of feather and decorating grass and other various things I put on the table for them. And for our final activity we talked about how birds glide. We went to the top of the stairs and threw a flat piece of paper off the stairs and watched it glide gently down, back and forth. Then we threw a crumbled up piece of paper and talked about the differences. The kids loved it. It was a great Time for Tots's Day.

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• N-tracing letter found on DLTK's Crafts for kids here.
  
• Inspiration for Animal/letter sheet from Enchanted Learning-but then I just made my own with free clip-art found online
  
• Bird Pattern and instructions found on 504 Main here
  
• Inspiration to build the nest: How Stuff Works or here
  

More Time for Tot's ideas can be found by clicking the Tab in my Navigation bar or here.

Come back tomorrow for an AMAZING giveaway!