Day 1

Circle Time: Show the children how to pretend to be birds and have them copy you flying around the classroom. Have the children flap their wings and fly around the classroom. (Show the children how to flap their arms like bird wings and pretend to fly).

*Optional* to make activity more fun you may want to place large thick blankets and pillows into the center of the floor (birds nest), or bring in a wading pool and place the pillows and blankets into the wading pool for a pretend birds nest. Toddlers love to lay and crawl around on soft items; they will have a great time! Show the children how to go tweet, tweet and sound like birds.

Art Time: Black Bird Puppets

Teacher will need to print out the black bird file, print out the two birds and use as a pattern in cutting out two per child, make sure you print out both, the left and right sided bird to use as a pattern for cutting out the birds for each child. You will find if the birds are printed out onto card stock paper they will be more durable than construction paper. Teacher will need to cut out the holes where the fingers go. Then have the children paint the black birds black. After the bird puppets dry, have the children use the puppets with the black bird rhyme listed below.

*Please Note* you may want to place the birds outside on a clothesline or place under a ceiling fan to have them dry quicker.

Learning Time: Feathers

Show the toddlers some colorful feathers. Make sure you watch the children carefully with the feathers. Place the feathers on a low table. You will want about three different colors of the feathers. Let the children touch and look at the feathers. Then show them how to sort the feathers.

You will need three paper plates. Glue one feather of each color to a separate plate; such as, glue a green feather to one paper plate, glue a blue feather to another paper plate, glue a yellow feather to the last paper plate, etc.

Teacher will Pick up a feather and show it to the children, then tell the children the color of the feather, show them the matching feather that you taped or glued onto the paper plate. Help the children to pick up the feathers and sort them onto the plates. For younger toddlers that are too young to do this activity, they can just have fun picking up the feathers and placing them onto the plates. Teacher will just pick up the feather from the wrong plate and smile and say oh this one is green, let's put it with the other green feathers. Then place the feather onto the green feather pile, etc.

Special Activity: Bird Egg Drop

Ask the parents to bring in some clean empty Kleenex boxes. Teacher will give each child a Kleenex box and some plastic Easter eggs. The empty Kleenex boxes will be pretend bird nests and the Easter eggs will be the pretend bird eggs. Give each child two or three plastic Easter eggs and show them how to drop the eggs into the Kleenex box and then show them how to reach inside and pull the eggs back out.

*Optional* If you do not have Easter eggs, you can provide the children with some large mega blocks and let them have fun dropping the blocks into the boxes and then pulling them back out.

Song/Finger Rhyme: Two little blackbirds

Two little blackbirds     (Show both birds)
Flying by a wall;     (pretend to fly birds)
One named Peter,     (hold up one bird)
The other named Paul.     (Hold up the other bird)
Fly away Peter!     (Fly bird behind your back)
Fly away Paul!     (Have the other bird fly behind your back)
Fly back Peter!     (Bring back one bird)
Fly back Paul!     (Bring back the other bird)

Have the children use the black birds from today’s art project to act out the movements in this fun rhyme.