Fly, fly away

A lovely contact from LinkedIn shared beautiful pictures of an empty birds nest she randomly found on her porch after a return from holiday. 

The intricate detail of it made me catch my breath. Nature is remarkable.

I commented that I would be sharing this with my girls and was busy planning a topic day on the subject when the lady responded and said she couldn't wait to read about it.

We had a lovely learning day as a result. We started the topic with a quiz, with me asking the girls related questions about birds, their babies and nests. They looked at the pictures of the nests and were discussing the materials used. 

We watched half a dozen YouTube videos on nests being built, babies hatching, being hand fed and babies learning to fly. 

We cuddled on the sofa together and read a book on pigeons together, dug out the farm set and found the dovecot and birds to visualise it.



They learnt about them being kept and used as messengers before the age of phones, which blew their mind! A time before mobile phones! I was surely joking.

Sophia drew a pigeon from the book and was particularly fascinated by the lay out of their toes.

We finished the unit with Sophia writing a short report piece on what she knew about birds, babies and nests.

This all snowballed from a picture shared. Home educating can be that easy. 

They practiced reading, writing, art skills, learnt a little about the historical use for pigeons, learnt life skills in how to save a baby bird if you were to find one, and general information about the topic of nests  and birds. 

I drew the line of feeding them pigeon for their lunch, they had chicken instead and they were shaking the eggs and holding them up to the light to check if there was a chick in them.....this sparked a further investigation into why not all eggs have chicks. 



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