Seeing the World with New Perspective
Have you ever asked a 5-year-old about a favorite dinosaur, only for the answer to be something you’ve never heard before? Young children have incredibly eager minds, including an amazing ability to see details that adults frequently overlook. So, when the Flying Squirrel teachers set out some bird watching materials, it didn’t take long before all eyes were on the skies.
As spring continues to flourish in the preschool yard, our resident feathered friends are busy building nests, picking for bugs in the grass, and chittering off a variety of mating calls and birdsong. With this avian activity happening all around, the teachers of the Flying Squirrel group created a special bird watching station to see if the children would take an interest in some scientific identification and observation. Within a few days, the teachers had to expand the one small table into two tables, overflowing with binoculars, bird books, and scientific logs. “This group, in particular, as soon as you set anything up, they get deeply engaged, and they seem to really enjoy each new learning experience,” shared Lead Teacher Amy.
The children have been making new observations and discoveries every day, including sighting a hawk family in the palm tree near the horse trail, and making tally marks each time a bird flies overhead or stops for a bath. The tally sheet has not only incorporated math concepts into the learning but has even led to new vocabulary for the children as they’ve broadened their understanding of ‘taking a bath’ and ‘shower’ to include the verb of “bathing!”
“Birding gives children an outlet for their scientific curiosity as well as their need to master a subject,” shared Amy. “One of the children, who is normally moving around a lot, ended up sitting for 45 minutes, deeply engaged in going through 500+ pages of books in order to find and match the 12 birds identified in one of our bird sound books to every other book those birds were mentioned in,”
The children in the Flying Squirrels are even making the connection in asking if birds come from dinosaurs or if a pterodactyl would be considered a bird.
The children have been delighting in sharing the information they have been discovering about the world of birds. It is learning experiences like these that really highlight how the more they learn about the environment around them, the more they feel connected to it, helping build a lifelong relationship to the natural world.
