Bird Nest Cookies and Bird Matching Game

Practically every Bird Unit I looked at online had a Bird-Nest Cookie or Bird-Nest snack associated with it. I wasn't planning to make any of them because I don't really love no-bake cookies (I prefer to save my stomach space for really GOOD cookies, so I never bother with ones I consider mediocre) and most of them were those chocolate-coconut no-bake kind, or the ones you make with chow mein noodles. But on our last day, we didn't have an activity to do, and the boys were asking if we could cook something, and then I ran across a recipe for making macaroons (not to be confused with macarons) into bird-nests. I've never made macaroons before but I like them pretty well, so we decided to give it a try.

Here is the recipe. It's an easy one. These would be good with melted chocolate drizzled on top, or for Easter. I wouldn't make them instead of . . . any other cookie, really, but if you want bird-nests, they're great. :)

And by happy coincidence, I had a bag of Easter M&Ms (yes, from last Easter season) in the pantry, so we even had robins'-egg-colored eggs.

A good kindergarten-age activity that Malachi really enjoyed was this matching game. (We also played memory game with these same pages cut up, with the older boys.) It's just the sort of thing he feels proud of himself for being able to do. 

He's been going around wearing this one pink glove lately. No one knows why.

Bird Nest activities

This was one of the children's favorite days, I think. There are a lot of resources on building models of birds nests using various things. If it had been Spring, we might have attempted building with some actual nest materials (twigs, grasses, etc.) but there was no way we were venturing out in 3-degree weather to hunt for them. So, I decided we'd build life-sized nests using things around the house. Two of the children got to be the parents and two got to be the babies, and they took turns building the main types of nests: cup, pendulum, spherical, platform, and cavity. (There is lots of information about nests and a worksheet about the types, here.) I let them use anything they could find around the house (within reason). Once the nest was built, I let the parents feed their babies by dropping a chocolate chip into their open beak. You would have thought this was the best idea EVER. The children begged to build nests every day for the rest of the unit. :)

Hungry birdies---cup nest

Spherical nest

Pendulum nest

Platform nest

(What the platform nest looked like underneath---very accurate)

Cavity nest

There are tons of cool videos of birds building nests. Here are a bunch we enjoyed:

Robins with their babies

Time lapse of a nest being built

Hummingbird nest (so tiny!)

This one was our favorite---SO amazing!---the weaver bird

For lunch that day, we had these "eggs in a nest" (Fried eggs inside toast)---I made the cut-out insides into little birdies. And I NEVER do cute things with our food, so the children thought it was very special. :)

And Sebby (on his own) made this sweet little nest---the mama and the baby robin come out of their pockets, so the mama can swoop down and feed the baby. So cute!