Birds – one theme, lots of ways.

Written by Laura @ one.wild.family.life

I love having a theme to stick to and inspire play and reading throughout the week. I don’t do an activity on it every day, but two or three play set ups a week pulled together with some reading works for me and my little ones. This week we’ve looked at Birds, here’s what we did, and some other ideas too.

• Wooden birds, lots of the wooden toy brands have a great selection of birds, we especially love Lanka Kade for the variety available, from flamingos to toucan, peacocks to robins. But also Wudimals have a lovely selection, as do Eric and Albert and Holztiger. A basket full of birds can lead to some lovely small world play, or chats about colour and features and anatomy too. Pair the birds with the unique and exclusive wooden tree which is an amazing size and great for balancing the birds on.

• Get outside for a walk, birds are everywhere, parks, beaches, walking paths, woodlands. We love taking our Little Robin Education Bird ID Cards out with us and seeing which ones we can spot. The real life pictures make it supper accessible for successfully identifying different species. (you can even match them to your wooden animals too!)

• Alexia Claire has a great selection of postcards with birds, eggs and feathers on – these engaging illustrations are great to help inspire some art, painting or drawing. We love propping ours up with the Yellow Door stand it stone. This is also a great time to have a listen to some bird song using YouTube or similar.

• Build a nest – we grabbed some coloured silks some cushions and blankets and made a cosy nest for ourselves – the perfect place to sit and read some books about birds. I always love to mix fiction and non-fiction. We then made smaller nests and put our Tickit eggs in them while chatting about chicks and how the birds keep them warm and safe. A great thing to do if you have a garden or window sill is head out on a nest material collecting walk – collect anything you think a bird might like to pop into its nest to keep it cosy (treasure tubes are great for collecting and containing materials) and put them all in one place outside to see if any birds accept your offering!

• If you have little ones interested in mark making, or letter or number formation grab a tray and fill it with bird seeds and get your child to use their finger to write a letter, or make a line/zigzag etc. There are loads of different choices for letter and number resources to add into this type of activity that will also give lots of longevity in learning.