ARKive - Animal Website

A great place to search for bird photos, videos and information is ARKive:  http://www.arkive.org/
They have information on other animals too.  I think the kids would really enjoy looking at the animals on this site!

Bird Videos

Here are some bird videos that the kids really enjoyed.  They begged me to put them on the blog, so they can show you.

Shoebill Stork
http://www.arkive.org/shoebill/balaeniceps-rex/video-08.html

Bald Eagles
http://www.arkive.org/bald-eagle/haliaeetus-leucocephalus/video-09d.html

Journal Pages

The kids love "journal time" because they can write whatever they wish in their journals.  I love to see and hear what they are thinking about.  I am still helping several of them sound out words, but some are able to do it by themselves.  That is a big step into being able to write down their thoughts and it is very helpful to them when learning to read.

Nature Observation Journal

Publishing our own bird book and keeping a class "Nature Journal" are two of my SD Innovation Lab project-based learning projects.

When we see something happening out in nature, we enter it into this journal.  There are four big booklets as we have one for each season.  At first they watch me do the writing and then a few months in I assist them with writing it.  Here are some of the pages.

Working on our Book

We have been busy working on our bird book that we will soon publish.  We have researched and came up with the important details about each bird as a class.  Then they sat by me and we talked about how to draw the bird and what detail to be sure to add.  Then they drew the bird and colored it. Here are two hard-working students.

Bob the Builder?

Where it all began...

At about the second or third week of school, I decided it was time to start teaching the kids about birds.  I opened the box from SD Game, Fish and Parks in front of the kids and they saw their very own Backyard Birds of SD field guide.  This is what I first used to teach the students about birds along with a Power Point slideshow of local birds.  They keep their booklet in school all year long and by now they have nearly every bird in there memorized.  We are thankful for these booklets as they were a wonderful teaching tool!