The Robin is many people’s favourite with its bright red tummy.
Robins are very friendly and will often come up really close to us. They sometimes follows gardeners around because when gardeners dig in the soil, they might turn up worms which Robin will then fly down and eat. Robins’ eggs are a creamy colour with reddish speckles.
They have many different songs and they sing for most of the year. Listen to this one singing a Winter song in a tree last week:
Bird Quiz: Let’s see if you can remember the names of the 6 birds we have looked at over the week. See if you can point to each one and say their name:
How many did you get right?
Making Bird Food
On Google Classrooms you can find a video of Mrs MacLeod showing you how to make fat balls to hang out for birds.
And here’s a great idea from Mrs Marshall of how to make bird food, using cereal:
Making a bird feeder is a great way to help out our feathered friends in wintertime. All you need is pipe cleaners/string, Cheerios/Hoops cereal, and something to hang your bird feeder with such as ribbon. Start by threading Cheerios/Hoops onto pipe cleaners/string – a great fun fine motor skills challenge (you may enjoy munching some while you thread!). Leave space at either end to twist the ends together or tie together to ‘seal’ the ends. Add a ribbon or string for hanging and your bird feeder is done. Hang and enjoy watching the birds enjoy their snack! Remember to hang them in a safe place for visiting birds, avoid low spaces where they are within a cat’s reach, and avoid open and noisy areas.
The Big Garden Bird Watch
If you are taking part in the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch this weekend, have fun and we hope you spot something.
People who watch birds have a big long name – Ornithologist. Sometimes they use tools like binoculars to help them spot birds. You could also take a bird book when birdwatching to help you identify birds, and perhaps some seed or raisins to attract the birds.
But really the only tools you need to watch birds are these –
– Eyes and Ears. So keep looking and listening and you can be a Young Ornithologist!
Blackbird has shiny black feathers. He has a bright yellow beak and a yellow ring round each eye. He is about 25cm long (try looking for number 25 on a ruler). He likes to eat worms, insects and berries. Mrs Blackbird is not black… She is brown all over and so are young blackbirds.
Blackbirds have 3,4 or 5 babies which hatch from blue speckled eggs. Mum and Dad feed them together:
Mrs MacLeod once had a pet blackbird called Blackie who started coming to her doorstep every morning and evening for raisins. He loved raisins!
The Beatles wrote a lovely song called “Blackbird”. You can listen to it here. See if you can clap or tap along. https://youtu.be/Man4Xw8Xypo
– Starlings are bold noisy birds who like to hang around together, chatting.
– They are mainly black with white speckles, but if you look closely you can see flashes of shiny metallic green and purple in their feathers.
– They have quite big feet and so walk about a lot.
– They are omnivorous, which mean they eat all kinds of things, including seeds, fruit and insects. (I always see them in the car park at Silverburn shopping centre. I think maybe they wait there to pick up scraps of food dropped by shoppers….)
– At night just before they go to bed, Starlings gather together in huge flocks and do something REALLY AMAZING!
Click on the green link and watch this video to see what they do: https://youtu.be/M1Q-EbX6dso
Flying around in groups of thousands, the starlings move together like a giant swirly black cloud, making wonderful patterns in the sky! It is one of the great sights of Nature! It is called a Murmuration – a great word. Can you say “Murmuration”…?
Mark Making Challenge:
If you have any black paint and some cotton buds, you could try dipping a cotton bud in paint and dabbing it on paper to make a picture of this amazing sight. Or just use a pen, pencil or crayon to make dots and create a murmuration of starlings or any other pattern you like.
– It is a very small colourful bird. – It likes to eat seeds, berries, caterpillars and insects.
– In Winter blue tits join up and fly round looking for food together. (If you want to feed them they like fat balls, peanuts and sunflower seeds. They are so light they can hang easily on bird feeders or fat balls and peck away.)
-There are many other types of tit in the Tit family. Here are two other members of the family. Can you spot their differences?
This video below shows all 3 types feeding in Pollok Park just last Saturday. Can you spot them all?
Who is the biggest and who is the lightest? Here are some little Maths challenges for you about the three birds:
Hello everyone, we hope you have been enjoying some of the sunny weather outdoors! Maybe you spotted a few birds. Mrs Toman was birdwatching in her garden this Saturday. Take a look…
Each day this week we are giving you a few titbits and challenges linked to a different bird, in the run up to the RSPB Big Garden Watch:
Monday’s Bird is Clever Crow:
– Crow is black all over and quite big – about 50cm long.
– Crows are one of the cleverest birds in the world. Did you know that they can recognise shapes and colours? They can also recognise human faces and they have a good memory.
– Crows are also cool with tools: they can use simple tools like a stick to poke around for food.
At Busby School & Nursery, we often see Crows in our playground and on the rooftops. They like to fly down for crumbs the children drop at playtime… Crows are not fussy eaters.
There are other types of bird in the Crow Family. Some of the ones we see most often in Scotland are Crow, Raven and Magpie. (The hooded crow usually lives in the Highlands.)
In Scottish, we sometimes call crows “craws”. We often sing the song “Three Craws” in nursery, especially today, which is Burns Day. Why not sing along today with the Singing Kettle, and don’t forget the actions… Click on this link to join in: https://youtu.be/Io6ZXgSbyW8
You could even make some Craw puppets to use whilst you sing, perhaps using cardboard from an old cereal box. Just cut a big circle, draw on some eyes and a beak and stick on some wings made from black paper. Here are some other ideas for crow crafts: Have fun, and look out for Clever Crow outside!
Hi everyone, has anyone seen any birds out on this lovely sunny Friday? Miss Lawson spotted some Mallard Ducks and a Coot at the pond at Queen’s Park today. Here they are:
And in the woods by Greenbank Gardens Mrs Macleod noticed something very unusual – five green parrots in the trees!! Can you believe it? They are a small kind of parrot, known as parakeets. Normally they live in the jungle and hot countries like Africa and Asia, but they might be pets that have escaped here and are now living happily in the wild. I hope they don’t mind the cold Scottish winter…
Here are the Greenbank Parakeets on video:
In the run up to the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch, we will give you a titbit about a different bird each day to help you spot them and learn a little more about them.
Today’s bird is the Thrush: Thrush has a brown body and a smart white tummy with brown spots. Thrush is about 20cm long. If you have a ruler you could look for the number 20 on it to find the Thrush’s size. Thrush has a lovely song and likes to sing from the very tops of the trees! 🎵🎶
Thrushes are quite shy but you can often see them hopping about in grassy areas as they like to pull up worms there. Snails are another favourite food.
In Winter it can hard for Thrushes to find any worms if the ground is hard and frozen, so you will sometimes see them in the trees eating up all the red berries…
Here is a little rhyme for you about Thrush:
Mrs Thrush is in a rush, To find some food for tea, Because she knows that when it snows, The ground is going to freeze, There won’t be any worms to pull, And so to keep her belly full, She gobbles up the berries On the bushes and the trees.
You could ask an adult or a big brother/sister to read this rhyme to you, then try saying it back to them, a line at a time.
Can you think of another word that rhymes with “Thrush”? Maybe you could make up your own rhyme or a story about Mrs Thrush. Or you could try drawing her lovely speckled tummy.
Hi everyone!At the end of January there is a special event taking place. You can watch this video for a little introduction:
I wonder if you have seen any birds from your window or when out on a walk recently. In Winter it can be easier to spot them because there are less leaves on the trees to hide them, and they are often out searching for food in the cold. If you are able to feed them then that is even better. Perhaps like me you noticed some bird footprints in the snow recently:
Every January, the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) holds a Big Garden Bird Watch. It has been doing this for 42 years.
It asks us to watch the birds outside our window for one hour and record the number of different birds we see on a chart like this:
The results are counted and they help to work out which birds in our country are doing well and which ones might need a bit of help.
If you would like to take part, you can find out more at this link: https://www.rspb.org.uk/get-involved/activities/birdwatch/
It’s a great way of practising your counting skills, as well as learning about Science & Nature!
Even if you don’t do the Bird Watch, you can still have loads of fun watching birds and working out what they all are. This video I took in Pollok Park this week shows how close you can sometimes get to them…
In the run up to the Big Garden Bird Watch we will be posting some fun facts about different birds and how you can spot them, as well as activities linked to our feathered friends. Keep your eye on the blog and Google Classrooms!
Continuing with Health & Wellbeing Week, the Pink and Yellow groups have been exploring feelings through various props in the Story Box, inspired by the lovely book “We are Together”by Britta Teckentrup. It is a story about self belief, resilience, and the power of friendship. “Look at this… Sun up in the sky with rain. The rain becomes a rainbow!”“I don’t mind rain.” “I hate rain.” “This one is a shooting star.”
As they played with the props the children also began telling their own stories:
“Evil seagulls come out when there’s a storm. The butterfly will wait” (till the storm has passed)
“We need to add more people.”
“This sounds like birds singing.”
“This one makes it heavier.” Aw… all cooried up with a soft blanket and heart pillow…
”If storm clouds gather and we’re caught in the rain, Let’s splash through the puddles until the sun shines again.”
(from “We are Together”)
The Yellow and Pink groups have been having a variety of outdoor adventures. Today we went on a local walk for a Nature Scavenger Hunt, looking out for different coloured leaves, spider webs and birds. We ticked off all of them! We stopped to collect pine cones in the lane. We are going to wash, dry and paint them later. “We’ve found tons!” We enjoyed feeling the beautiful tree bark.
“It feels scratchy” “Look, I found more moss.” “Here’s some yellow leaves!” “Look! Spider webs!” We also came across some blackberries and interesting fungi. “The birds will eat them” (berries)
“Some of them are poisonous, so you don’t touch them” (fungus) We then walked round to the back of the new nursery building for a sneak peek at how it is coming along.
Back at nursery, various outdoor investigations and physical challenges have been taking place: Balancing, transporting, and building core strength Ingenious minds construct their own see-saw After all that… a well deserved Snack.
Keep up to date with what we're getting up to in nursery!
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Robins’ eggs are a creamy colour with reddish speckles.
