Monday was the last day of the 22nd annual Great Backyard Bird Count, which ran February 15-18. Led by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, this event uses regular citizens to help collect data about wild birds. People who choose to participate are asked to go outside for 15 minutes each day of the event to identify as many birds as they can and report the findings to the project.
Since we had already discussed National Bird Day in January, I thought this day might be a good review day for students. Activities varied from preschool to Kindergarten but, for the most part, students moved in various ways throughout a field of birds set up in the gym. When they stopped, they had to go to a cone with a bird card and a paper with many different birds on it. They had to place a game piece on the matching bird. Afterwards they rolled a die to see how many exercises they had to do for that bird. It was fun to see the preschool children counting the dots on their die. Kindergarten students not only did the activity with the die, but also placed tokens on their birds and at the end of class we checked to see which bird had the most tokens. We decided that was the bird that frequented our yard the most. It was a fun integrated math activity.
It's interesting how discussing birds in PE has created some fun conversations in class. Some students are sharing with me the birds they are seeing in their own backyards. Cardinals, robins, and blue jays seem to be the most recognizable.
This class moves to the song "Rockin' Robin" as they travel through the yard of birds.
This student places her game piece on the hummingbird picture. It's a match!
This student rolls his die and shows that he has 3 dots on it. He will do 3 jumping jacks.
Lunges are done at the black capped chickadee.
As this student prepares to do squats, he has added another token to the black crow.
There are already 4 tokens at this location.
This student performs jumping jacks at the robin.
