What to do with a classroom bird feeder

Choosing Feeders

    For the widest variety of birds, think about your levels. Some birds like to eat from the ground, others from hanging feeders, others from suet, and still others from elevated trays. Of course, your classroom location will determine which birds visit your feeder. When I was on the playground side of my school I was visited by very different birds than we see on the forest side.
    I decided to start small with the free feeder from BirdSleuth (offered occasionally). Over the past five years, I've added more and more! It's important to choose something that is easy to clean, inexpensive, and sturdy.

     Trays: A plastic tray is a great starting point because it's easy to clean and easy to replace. Because I have a heating unit right outside my window, I have the perfect spot to place a tray of sunflower seeds. (I buy the 40 lb. bags at Tractor Supply, which last about 2 months for $20)
     My students love the juncos, cardinals, chickadees, and finches that come to the tray. We sometimes put out unsalted peanuts, which attracts my class's favorite: the blue jay.
     Tube feeders: These are cheap and attract a nice variety of finches. Last year, though, we had record rainfall, and I did find that mold sometimes grew in the nyjer seed.
     Suet feeders: Suet is inexpensive and attracts woodpeckers and nuthatches, which are fun to watch. If you are not near a forest, you may find that starlings come to get your suet, which is also interesting.
     Peanut butter: In the years that I don't have any students with allergies, I purchase peanut butter to put outside as well. You can see the feeder in the photo above, but honestly it's easy enough to just smear peanut butter on some branches or put it on some wired pine cones. The Carolina wrens love it! Plus, it's way cheaper than many other kinds of seed.
     Feeder cam: No place for a feeder? No problem! The Ontario FeederWatch and the Cornell Birds Feeder are great to display for students.
    Feeder cleaning: Whatever kind of feeder you use, be sure to clean it frequently so that you are not inadvertently spreading disease.

Identification

     Part of the fun of observing birds is learning their names. I like to use a classroom birds slideshow as a fun icebreaker at the start of the school year. Kids like practicing their identification skills with photos I've taken at the window. They're often amazed to find out how many different species we can see just from our classroom.
     The allaboutbirds.org site is excellent for teaching students website navigation skills. I especially appreciate that it doesn't have external ads! With these webpages, you can teach all about digital text features, navigation, and browsing. There are great nonfiction texts there for the reading as well.
     Will your students make some identifications that sound silly at first? Absolutely! It's only through practice that students learn how to find the maps to see if a bird lives in their area, how to sift through the photos of similar birds, and how to connect bird behavior to different types of birds. Be patient and make the identification process a learning experience from start to finish.

Bird Observation Journal

     Once students get to be good at identification, I get out the bird observation journal. This is a place for students to record what they are seeing at the window. Kids may get up and look out the window, one or two at a time, as long as they write down what they see.
    Each year, students decide how they'd like to organize the journal. Sometimes students prefer to go by hour, while at other points students like to just write down what they see in a more casual way.
     There are occasionally discrepancies and problems with our data, which just means...we're doing science! When there are issues (wait, that wasn't a white-crowned sparrow, it was a white-throated sparrow!), we can discuss what these mean for our data and what to do next.

Phenology

     The records in our observation journals then become data for future years! We can track when the juncos will arrive, when the white-throated sparrows will leave, and when the goldfinches will turn yellow. As I tell my students...it's all because we noticed what was there and wrote stuff down.

Closing Thoughts

     I'm not sure when the process of knowing what lives around us and following the patterns of season and sky became unworthy of teaching. When I was in fifth grade, I told my teacher that I wanted to be a naturalist when I grew up. She said, "That's not a job."
     This is the kind of thinking that has brought us here--facing a future with insect populations in collapse, monarch butterflies disappearing, once familiar birds of field and forest now rare and unseen. You can't love what you don't notice. Taking the time to help students appreciate and love what surrounds us is worth the effort.
   

Animal Adaptations Synthesis

    What kid doesn't love learning about animal adaptations? In this age of Wild Kratts and Nat Geo Wild, it seems as if students know more about animals than ever before. An animal adaptations unit is the perfect way build on this background knowledge and encourage students to consider topics more deeply. It is also the perfect springboard for overlapping cycles of inquiry.

Animals in the Classroom

    I've never had hamsters, gerbils, or other typical classroom pets. But the classroom is always filled with animals! We've had mealworms, crickets, visiting toads and salamanders, tadpoles, and of course the birds who visit our feeders.
    The different animals have appealed to different groups of students. One boy (who happened to sit near the window) took an especial interest in recording the numbers of birds that we saw. He learned to identify the common species and started giving lessons to other students. Over the course of the last few months, students have noticed that different birds prefer to feed in different places. "The chickadee and the tufted titmouse both come to the feeder, but the robins never do." 
    Just a few weeks ago a student brought in some wood frog eggs, which have hatched into tadpoles. Students noticed that the tadpoles stay still most of the time. "Are they dead? They're not moving," was a common comment of the first few days. 
    These experiences with watching and noticing were vital for our later talk about animal adaptations. Students began the formal lessons with their own firsthand experiences instead of just having secondhand experiences. These firsthand opportunities to observe and talk about animals in an informal way built a firm foundation for our later lessons.

Adaptations Lessons

    Several weeks ago I started more formal science lessons about animal adaptations. I started with a text that I wrote  few years ago, a text designed to get kids saying the word "adaptations" over and over again! 
    Then, students participated in a bird beaks demonstration activity. Using simple household materials, students tried out different model bird beaks. (Directions for this activity are easy to find; my set of full instructions with student pages is available here.) 
    During and after the activity, students mentioned birds that they knew: "This is like a cardinal," they said confidently at the sunflower seeds station. "Do any of our birds eat bugs in bark?" a student asked at the other station. (I loved the use of our birds!)
    Students also used an embedded presentation on my student blog to take notes about camouflage. I've gone back and forth about categorizing examples of camouflage. On the one hand, it seems like going into too much detail. On the other hand, giving students lots of examples and strong vocabulary really enhances their conversations later.
    Right away, students were applying the ideas from the formal lessons into their daily observations. "The tadpoles don't move, probably because they blend in with the bottom of the pond," one student said.
    Looking out the window, another student reflected, "The robin's beak is like a set of chopsticks! I just saw it get a worm!" 

Synthesis

    With all of these experiences, it became time to synthesize and put it all together! Students were asked to choose an animal and find information about its adaptations. 
    This wasn't a normal animal report--students were specifically looking for information about the animal's adaptations. Some students chose to look back to animals they have previously studied. "I did a report on the red panda in third grade, can I work on it again?" one student asked. Other students took the opportunity to research new and unusual creatures. I offered a coupon bounty to students who would agree to study invertebrates--hey, invertebrates need some love! 
    By this point in the year, students should be capable of conducting a simple Internet search and using the application of their choice to create a product. For the most part, things went smoothly. Questions came from students who needed some more help with crafting search terms or wondered how a feature helps an animal to survive. My hardest challenge? Keeping up as kids called my name from around the room--not for help, but because they wanted me to see the cool information they were finding. 
    It was nice to see the synthesis of content and process in this stage. We have come so far as a community that whenever there was a question of "How do I...?" multiple hands went up to help.  The conversations also centered firmly on the learning, as students were engaging with Internet resources to find adaptations that helped their creatures to survive. Yes, they loved it, but even more importantly, it was an activity that highlighted key learning for our grade level.

    Informal experiences can have a huge impact on more formal units. When working with animal adaptations, I saw that our work all year led to serious thinking about animal adaptations.
   And this is not bad for Day 5 of PSSA testing!