Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Early Bird Gets the (Book)worm

Mikro and I have been reading about and studying birds. Some of our recent reads are:

Wings Along the Waterways (Wonderful and beautifully illustrated.)
Today at the Blebird Cafe (Poems.)
Blue Sky, Bluebird (Gorgeous!!! Five stars!)
Urban Roosts (Wonderful! Great look at how animals adapt to a changing environment.)
One Small Square: Backyard (Great, as is the whole series.)
Flute's Journey (A migration tale.)
Hummingbird Nest (Sweet and lovely.)
Birds of the Night (We love owls!)
All About Owls (Ditto, and can Jim Arnosky make a bad book? I don't think so!)
The Bird Alphabet Book (Awesome, like all the alphabets by Jerry Pallotta!)
Bird Watcher (One of the DK activity books, great fun!)
Sing, Nightingale, Sing! (British, so slightly different species)
Birds of New York (great field guide, organized by bird color, and thus easy for kids to use. My favorite local field guide.)











And we've flipped through this bird fandex:



Since it's spring, we're also back to bugs. Oddhopper Opera is a wonderful collection of poems about insects and other creepy crawly critters, which gives kids a great sense of the cycle of the year from the invertebrate perspective. This is one of Mikro's all time favorite books. We highly recommend it.



Mikro is obsessed with Monarch Butterflies. We've been looking at these books:



And we electronically "adopted" a monarch egg on Live Monarch. I'm hoping to buy milkweed plants from them soon (still too cold here at night), in addition to getting some free milkweed seeds. We are also looking into becoming a Monarch Way Station through Monarch Watch and possibly tagging butterflies. And it was recently the 40th anniversary of Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar. Our homeschool group has scheduled a reading group with craft and science activities centered around this book. We're really looking forward to it.

1 comment:

Garden State Kate said...

You have some of our faves here too..we'll be sure to check out the others!