Bird Watching with Binoculars

I had a flood of ideas going through my mind when I read that this week's Unplugged Project theme would be birds. There are so many possibilities when you consider projects involving eggs, feathers, seeds, or birds themselves.

I concluded that I could get rid of some of the garbage I've been collecting by making binoculars out of toilet paper rolls. From there, I thought it might be neat to gather a collection of photos of some of the birds who frequent our backyard and chart how often we see them.

Little Bit has gotten better about differentiating between ducks and geese and some of the other birds we see regularly, so this seemed like a great way to get her to start really looking for differences between the various bird species.

Daddy-O obligingly went around and snapped some photos of birds that were hanging around. Within about 45 minutes he had photographed geese, Mallard and Muscovy ducks, coots, several finches, a crow, and a woodpecker.

Once they were printed, we glued them onto our chart.

As for the binoculars, Little Bit got to pick out some wrapping paper around which to wrap the TP rolls. Not surprisingly, she chose the pink with polka dots paper.

We affixed the paper to the TP rolls, then roughly followed these instructions to make the binoculars. Once they were complete, I took Little Bit outside to show her how to use her new toy.

 

She caught on quickly!

Each day Little Bit will put stickers beside the pictures of birds that we see while we're outside. I will continue to add photos of birds as we come across them.

Thanks, Mom Unplugged for this week's bird theme! Come on over to Unplug Your Kids to see what ideas others came up with!