our shared forest

We went to the Botanical Gardens yesterday for a field trip with some of our homeschool friends. The field trip was about bird migration and how they live not only where we are, but also all along the way the importance of conservation and habitat along the journey to wherever they are migrating to. I thought it was a well done field trip. They played games, did some bird "watching" and learned to identify some shade trees birds love.

Here the kids are in the classroom - they are labeling the parts of a bird.


Getting instructions for the first game:


birds have to pass through lots of power lines and they can be very dangerous, so these two mama's are being power lines and it is the first obstacle the kids had to go through. If they ran into it, then they had to go to another part of the game.


cats can be very dangerous to birds, so Beatrice was the cat and all the kids had to get past her too and if she caught them then they had to go to another part of the game.


Here the kids are in a safe nest, but who's going to sacrifice themselves to the cat for the others to make it across?


building and windows can cause problems in bird migration, so the kids had signs on their backs and those passing had to tap them and if their not card on their back allowed them passage then they could run on through. (the buildings were the kids who didn't make it past the other obstacles.)


Birds have to gather food


It turned out that only a few kids made it all the way and even then, some had gathered bad eggs or food. What a great way to learn how hard it is to be a bird. We learned a lot we didn't know.

Then we moved on to bird watching...


The kids had a list of birds they had to "find" and identify


here the kids are writing down the names of the birds they "saw"


Lastly, the kids identified trees in the shade garden that birds like to nest in. Here are the boys working hard at getting the names down of those trees.


I thought it was a pretty great field trip that managed to keep all the kids engaged the whole time AND we learned A LOT!