Feathers and Frogs

4/24/12

Feathered Frenzy – Homeschoolers

Last Thursday I had the eight year olds in feathered frenzy.  Ken was doing the introduction and asking all sorts of great questions about birds and spring and the kids had a lot of very knowledgeable answers.  Homeschoolers really do benefit from concentrated one on one attention.  It did leave me wondering if there was much left to teach them and if I could keep their attention but as the day unfolded I realized they were really into the experience.  The morning was all about the birds with the stations and went pretty seamlessly.  We all were wondering if the “feet” portion was going to go over for a full ten minutes so I brought in colored pencils and divided up a page into four squares for the kids to draw the three different kinds of feet and the blank for a fourth foot that they made up or had seen on a bird.  The time was filled and then some.  Yay, art!  As Carli mentioned in our wrap up, the afternoon was such a contrast from what we had done in the morning.  There was very little about birds but was engaging nonetheless.  There is so much going on in the woods and meadows right now it would have been hard to keep them focused just on the birds and so I think most of us opted for doing a variety of activities.  My group wanted to see the meadow and where I had found the water snake.  I decided to take them to the edge and have them observe where they thought the water might be.  You can’t see the water from where we were but I told them to look for plants that looked different than the surrounding plants.  They went right to it.  That was cool.  We ended up at the dipping pond and the kids helped me find tadpoles for the snakes.  They also were great at catching frogs and we got the pan and the key to the life in the wetlands and identified critters.  I didn’t know until the end that one of the Mom’s with me was a Montessori teacher.  She complimented me on how I had given the kids choices and provided a variety of things and didn’t try to make the entire group always do the same thing at the same time.  That felt really good.