Bird Craft- Week 1 of Summer Fun!

Happy Summer!

Our summer vacation started out with a "BANG!" as we did a super fast trip to visit family in Michigan (photos to come).  

After a couple of days to recover we're finally celebrating....

I just love Annika's Creative Spirit.  She surprised with a "party".  The girls put on a Dancing Show for us.  And then we all danced for a bit in our own special way.  LOL!  Annika loves pretending to be a robot while dancing.

Late last week (after a few days of down time) we started our little summer school program.  Well, that really should be summer "school program" because we're not following any strict schedule- we're just going with the flow at this point.

Before school was out I was getting a little stressed out trying to create or find a summer curriculum we could use at our leisure.  It seems like a silly thing to get worried about, doesn't it?  While I love to let the girls have free play I also wanted to include a little bit of school work into our daily life- math, reading, art, science, geography, etc.  What I REALLY wanted to avoid is hearing, "Mommy, I'm BORED!"

And that's when I remembered that Rachel (my friend IRL!) over at Sun Scholars had created a Summer Program!  PERFECT!  Here's a link to her Summer Program you can purchase.  She has a free sample kit you can download to see if it will work for your family.  The nice thing is that she offers tips on how to do the activities with younger children and how to make the activities more challenging for the older kids.  While we may not follow it exactly day-by-day we are using it and it also gives me a sense of control over our summer days.

We also started the Bird Sleuth- Most Wanted Birds investigation kit (I talked about it on this post).  The first Investigation included listening to mystery sounds of various animals and trying to describe those sounds.  I never realized how difficult it is to describe sounds!

Anyway...after the bird activity the girls wanted to do a Bird Theme for the rest of the week (so that was only Thursday and Friday).  The girls really wanted to do a bird-themed art project that day.  Ack!  What to do with the stuff we had at home?

And that's when I remembered the bird nest plates recently posted on Whatever. (Thank you Megan!) We even had everything we needed to make them.  Yippee!!!!

Annika working on her nest.

 My plate is in the middle.  Ava and I used a LOT more paint than Annika so ours needed drying time.  That's why Annika is already getting to work covering the brown half with "nesting" materials.  In our case the nesting materials ended up being twigs, various yarn and raffia.  And lots and lots of Modge Podge (glue) to hold it all together.

 I cut the bird shapes out of cardstock and we decorated the birds with whatever we had on hand....more paper, buttons and feather.  The purple bird is Ava's.  Love the button beak on hers! Mine is the brown with red/white checkered tummy.

 Annika created a blue bird with red tummy and blue tail feathers.

Ava was sooooo excited as this was her first time getting to use the (low-temp) hot glue gun.  She also learned that the pointy end of the gun can be quite hot.  Ouch!  She also LOVED gluing on all those buttons!

 We also cut out some eggs from various blue paper and added them to our nests.  I poured a ton of the modge podge glue all over the nests.  They took over a day to dry.

 

 Ava's

(hmm....I should take better photos of the finished -and dried!- project)

On Friday we made Bird's Nest cookies using the recipe I found a few years ago on the m&m website.  No photos.  Why?  We ate them up too fast!  LOL!

This week the girls have asked for a Rainbow Theme.  So we'll see what we do!