Hi, I’m Erin Austen Abbott, and welcome to the Field Trip Newsletter. It’s free to access and read once a month, but if you want to support my work, please consider a paid newsletter subscription: just $5/month, or save money with the $50/annual sub. Thank you so much for being here! I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to have you in this community. Enjoy!
To kick off 2024, I have several long-term lessons that I want to add to our homeschool lessons. These will be supplemental to our usual lessons, so perfect to do if your children are in traditional school. I’ll share those ideas here, but I’d love you to join us in this first lesson. I’ll also be documenting the progress on social media here, here, and here.
A friend and I took our children to the Memphis Zoo recently, and she talked about how her daughter had to identify 50 backyard birds for her class. It was a long-term assignment with a test at the end of the semester. I don’t know if I will quiz Tom on this, but I would love for him to successfully identify 50 birds by sight or call by the time he starts 6th grade in the fall. He knows the usual feathered visitors, the cardinals, the blue jays, the robins, etc… but what about the Wood Thrush or the Red-eyed Vireo?
We’ve been doing bird identification in some form for many years, but now I’m ready to help him step it up while also taking a step back while Tom puts these tools to work.
Where to get started:
You might have other ways that you would like to go about encouraging your children to embrace the world of birding, but these are the tools that work for us.
Books that we love for bird identification, although I’m sure your local library also has a great assortment: 1 / 2 / 3
The free app we use to identify
A notepad, pencil, and colored pencils; I love this notepad for the top spiral
What your child will gain from this lesson:
Observation skills
Quiet / Meditative time in nature
Ecology / Local ecosystem knowledge / Ornithology
Language skills
Community building: many towns have group bird watches and bird counts. Joining such a group is wonderful for your child to participate in.
Research skills
Observe migratory patterns in our communities
Patience
The Lesson: Skill Level: Easy
Make a habit of putting aside 20-30 minutes daily to observe the birds around you with your children. Listen for their calls, record them through the Merlin app, and write your findings in your notepad. Make note of differences between male and female birds of the same breed. Make a note of birds you see that might just be passing through. Keep a running list of birds on your nature walks or even when you are in a parking lot. My favorite bird lives mostly in parking lots where we live and build their nests on the ground!
Birds are the most active at dawn and dusk, so this is a great morning activity before school starts or around dinner time. It’s an excellent time to be still with your children and the birds around you.
Activity: Make feeders with your children using discarded toilet paper rolls, peanut butter, birdseed, and a tiny bit of yarn. This one is a little more involved but awesome!
This is also an excellent bird-watching weekend; even if you can’t work on 50, sign up for one weekend and see how your children respond to the birding adventure.
So, who’s with us in identifying 50 birds? We’d love to hear what breeds you see where you live, and I’ll undoubtedly report what we see, too. For the paid subscribers, see you here next week for travel tips, learning lessons from the road, itineraries, and more. - Erin