Aviary Field Trip

The aviary has "Winter Wednesdays" (we went last year too) where admission is only $1 each, which is about the right price for it. If you're willing to bundle up it's really fun. And we were lucky because it was quite a warm day---38 degrees or so---compared to the temperatures in the teens (and below) we'd been having the whole week earlier. There aren't a ton of birds, but there are enough to make it fun. We love the bald eagle and the toucan and the peacocks. Last year (it was early March) we saw flamingos too, but I suppose it was too cold for them this time.

Silly

It was pretty snowy, but the walks were mostly clear, and it was sunny.

So many ducks! They were really loud. What are ducks always so mad about?

Gratuitous pictures of Junie biting her finger

Pelicans

Oh, this little Birdie-boy is so cute! He was SO happy about all these ducks. He said he saw them smiling at him. :)

Toucan and toucan

Bird Poetry

We read and discussed three poems about birds (there are, obviously, dozens of good ones to choose from): Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Windhover, Carl Sandburg's From the Shore, and David Wagoner's Peacock Display. They aren't easy poems, but they're beautiful. And I love talking about poetry. I think the main thing I'm trying to teach the children about poetry is a sort of comfort with it---a willingness to guess at meanings and a realization that symbols and interpretations can be multi-layered. (Very useful lesson to learn about the scriptures, too.) We talk very basically about form (I always have them point out alliteration, rhyme, and repetition; and Abe can figure out rhyme schemes) but mostly I just like to discuss language: why did the poet use that word? What do these lines make you think of? What picture do you get in your head when you hear this?

I think they do really well with the right questions. For example, I asked what they thought the poet was trying to do with the repetition in the lines "Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers/ Out into the gloom it swings and batters,/ Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,/ Out into the pit of a great black world." Abraham said "It sounds like wings flapping up and down in the wind" and Malachi said "It sounds like the ocean waves." I was impressed. If they can be confident drawing varied meanings out of language, they can read and learn to enjoy any poetry! It's okay if I have to point them toward what is important, at this point.

Their favorite poem was the Peacock one. They thought it was SO funny. It's such a great description of the way the peahen ignored the peacock display we saw at the aviary last year. I asked them if they thought female humans ever ignored male humans showing off that way, and they said no. I said it depended on the female human. :) We also really liked the word "amphitheatric."

Seb (who has been semi-obsessed with drawing peacocks ever since our India Unit) made me this pop-up card during his free time the other day. You open a flap on the front and peer through the hole . . .

where you can see the peacock displaying his tail feathers in the background, and the unimpressed peahen, pecking at seeds (just like in the poem) in the foreground.

Some interesting bird videos

I never imagined there were so many interesting birds! Seeing these videos of them just made them memorable to us in a way reading about them alone didn't. Usually we'd read about a bird in a book (e.g. "The blue-footed booby has a very distinctive mating dance") and then we'd look up that same bird on YouTube to see if we could see it in action ourselves. We had to watch lots of the videos several times over so we could laugh at the birds' funny antics and notice every little detail of their behavior.

Laughing kookaburra. Have you heard one of these? So cute!

Satin bowerbird. This was the children's favorite. They think the bird stealing the blue straw and then setting off the car alarm is HILARIOUS.

Peacock display. We have seen a peacock doing this!

Frigate bird and Sage grouse. These guys both inflate their air sacs during courtship. Very weird and funny. It was new to me to learn about the air sacs birds have in addition to their lungs. How fascinating!

Mockingbird

Eagle swooping down

Another eagle

Blue-footed booby. So funny.

Slow-motion bird videos---some of these are cool

Goshawk flying through a tiny hole. Really amazing! The slow-motion parts are the best.

Lyrebird imitating construction sounds. Hilarious (we especially like it when he imitates people talking---that's what we sound like to him!)

Adaptations and Bird Beak activity

I still remember talking about adaptations in my Biology class in 9th Grade (Miss Cooper--she was SO great): we spent one class period crawling around the floor trying to grab things with different types of bird beaks. I wanted to do something similar as we talked about adaptations, and this site here had a lesson plan with lots of ideas. I modified them slightly, but the idea is simple enough: you try to pick up different types of food with different types of tools in order to see how adaptations can help a species prosper. We thought it was really fun.

Again, there are lots of resources for this sort of thing. I can't find my source, but I did use this worksheet

for Malachi. (It was too simple for the older boys---I had a couple other different, more complex, ones for them---here is one.) I've been trying to have Malachi start filling in very simple assignments like this now that he is 5 and getting closer to kindergarten. (I suppose we'll call next year his kindergarten year.) He really likes being able to write in answers like this!

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!

Koldt Bord and Smørrebrød

Every year, sometime close to New Year's Day, we make a grand buffet of appetizer-type foods and spend all day eating and watching something---usually bowl games, or old BYU football games (which we can get online). We love it. When we learned about the Danish custom of a koldt bord on Christmas Day (or "Second Christmas Day," the 26th), the children begged to do that instead. A koldt bord is basically the Danish version of the Swedish smorgasbord, the "cold table" with all kinds of finger foods and such. And the crowning glory of the table is the makings for smørrebrød, the famous Danish open-faced sandwich. We learned that smørrebrød is as much about beauty as it is taste---the Danes create aesthetic masterpieces with their sandwiches. They also have lots of complicated rules on how to eat it (herring before beef, and so forth) and they use lots of ingredients we haven't ever heard of, or at least don't have access to---strange (to us) things like liverwurst and remoulade and picked herring and white caviar.

We decided that even if our smørrebrød components weren't absolutely authentic, for our koldt bord, we'd replace our usual favorite appetizers (things like vegetable bars and artichoke dip) with the best and most creative sandwich ingredients we could think of, and try to create works of smørrebrød art like the ones pictured here. I wish we could have found/made some good rye bread, but we made do with some white bread I made, and a multigrain loaf from the store.

The older boys delighted in helping Sam and me come up with interesting spreads to go on the sandwiches. (I have been letting Sebby, especially [he shows the most interest], help me make sauces since he was a little boy, and he loves to taste, tilt his head, and say, "a liiiitle more lemon juice!") We made a horseradish mayonnaise for the roast beef, a (mock)-hollandaise sauce, an andalouse sauce (Belgian), tsatziki, a somewhat-spicy mustard, and an artichoke spread. We also had crabapple jelly, a green chili sea salt and an African-spiced sea salt, and some flavored balsamic vinegars. And then there were, of course, all our vegetables, fruits, eggs, and meats. It was a feast fit for kings and queens! More food than we could eat, too, but we made a nice dent in it that first day and are still eating it several days later. Yum!

Isn't our table lovely? It was a work of art itself. You'd be amazed how good Abe and Seb are at making things beautiful---they love the challenge of it. I told them to try to make everything look like it came from a fancy restaurant. Then I gave them a bunch of pretty platters and things to use for garnish, and they did all the arranging and setting-out themselves. Heaven forbid I should try to set something out in a bowl that wasn't "fancy enough"! They insisted on the best.

They were most proud of their meat and cheese tray. Prettier than the ones you buy ready-made at Costco!

The best and most fun part was crafting our smørrebrød. I thought some of the boys' ideas were strange, but their willingness to try unusual combinations often yielded surprisingly good sandwiches. (For example, Seb made a sandwich with crabapple jelly, apples, sprouts, and havarti cheese that was delicious!) Even Malachi wouldn't eat anything without finding something pretty to garnish it with first. A few of our prettiest and tastiest attempts:

This was a really fun thing to try and I think we'll probably do it again. Lots of work, but it's fun work! And we need to have some friends come help us eat it next time! My only regret was how quickly I got full.

Bird Calls and Birdsong in Music

One of the first sources you'll find when looking for bird information is probably this site, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It's awesome. Our favorite section was the one on bird calls and birdsongs, where you can look up individual birds and listen to their calls. We usually started here at the bird guide, where once you reach a given bird's page, you can hear its calls and songs as well as see other information about it.

I also have a really good iPad app called iBird Pro, which I got because it was on sale for .99 one time (regular price $19.99 or something)---but I love it because you can search for birds based on only what information you have ("it's brown, it's small, it's in Utah") and it has great photos and information too. And it also has bird calls to listen to. Having used it, I think I'd now pay even the $19.99 for it---it's certainly as useful as a good bird book. We'll definitely have to do another unit on birds sometime in the summer when we have more birds around (and more inclination to go out hunting for them) because it's really fun to see what we can identify.

We had a good book about the language of birds and all the different meanings they can convey through their various sounds. Fascinating!

This site has a little memory game you can play, matching birds to their songs. (It's free, but you have to create an account.)

We also listened to a bunch of classical music that incorporates birdsong (either imitative, or interpretive) and talked about why birdsong has been so inspiring to composers throughout history. I really loved doing this.  I always love it when we get to talk about something I have some background in (I love it when I get to learn something new, too, but it's just so fun to share my interests). I thought maybe I was getting a bit carried away by introducing the children to Messiaen, but they liked his music and were quite interested in his efforts to provide literal transcriptions (though transposed and adapted to the limitations of orchestral instruments) of birdsong. This isn't simple music by any means, but it's so interesting!

This site has clips from several good (and more traditional) bird-related pieces (e.g. Peter and the Wolf, Handel's Cuckoo and the Nightingale organ concerto). I also thought this was an awesome idea for a science project, but for children a bit older than mine. Still, it lists lots more ideas for music about birds!

Then I also played sections for the children from Olivier Messiaen's Réveil des Oiseaux and Oiseaux Exotiques. What cool, challenging music. Messiaen is quite fascinating. Did you know he came to Utah and wrote a piece called Des canyons aux étoiles… inspired by Bryce Canyon? That one has birdsongs in it too. Sebby and Abe really liked the parts of it we listened to---it's eerie and modern and very evocative.

And one more thing we did: I read the story of the Emperor and the Nightingale (Hans Christian Andersen, you know) out loud, and then we listened to the Stravinsky tone poem of the same name. (Or I guess it's called "Song of the Nightingale.") It's a great piece---not traditionally tonal, but I don't think it's one of those really strange pieces that's hard to listen to. The children were easily able to identify the "robotic" sound of the sections where the mechanical nightingale sang, and hear the more traditional beauty in the real nightingale's song. In fact, they liked the whole thing and asked to listen to it again the next day.

Oh! and then we also found a few YouTube videos of talking parrots doing amazing things like singing "How Much is that Doggie in the Window," to our great amusement. It was even funnier because most things Junie says these days sound exactly like a parrot talking. We laughed and laughed. Here are two videos we liked.

Bird Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

Birds! This unit was in honor of Malachi, for his birthday, although it didn't actually take place over his birthday. There are SO many resources on birds as a lesson unit, it must be very popular. People like birds, I guess. And who can blame them? So do I! We'll do this again (maybe with more specificity) when the weather is warm sometime. There were lots of activities (like making bird feeders, or birdwatching walks) that just didn't seem fun in the cold. But luckily, there was also plenty of other stuff to do.

I thought the day on how birds fly was really interesting (I learned a lot preparing for it). Feathers are so cool! We looked at some different types under our magnifying glasses, and held them under water and so forth. It was one of our favorite things that we did. Abraham loved to ruffle up his feather and then smooth it back together (connecting up all those little barbicels again) like a preening bird.

This video is a good basic review of feathers. There were several good books from the library too (listed above).

Also (I'm not sure where this fits, exactly), this is a nice free (printable) coloring book with a whole bunch of different kinds of birds in it.

Santa Lucia Day

Lussekatter and hot cocoa. This makes me hungry!

We were lucky because Sam was working from home on Santa Lucia Day, so "Lucia" had someone to serve this breakfast to in bed. Daisy is too young to be much help, but the boys and I had fun making the buns together, and I'd rather eat at the table anyway. But yum! We will certainly make these every year. Recipe here.

We had a Lucia crown, but it was too heavy for this tiny girl.

She wore her paper one instead. And my mom whipped up this little dress for her in about an hour. That's the kind of sewing prowess I fear I'll never have. Luckily my mom is so sweet and generous about doing stuff like this (which I didn't even ask her to do, I just asked if I could borrow an angel costume, but the ones she had were too big for Daisy).

Aaa, she's so cute!

The procession prepares to . . . process? Proceed?

Junie feels that she should be a part of this, and inserts herself into the line.

Lussekatter (Saffron Lucia Buns)

These saffron buns are SO good! They're just slightly sweet---not quite like a cinnamon roll. They're soft and fragrant and the pearl sugar adds a delightful crunch on top. I hadn't ever cooked with saffron before and it gives them such a gorgeous color, and flavor. Saffron is expensive, but I found it at World Market for a pretty good price. And having tasted these buns I would buy it again! I think we'll make these every year.

The Swedes (and the Danes) make these for Santa Lucia Day on December 13th. The oldest girl in the family wears a white dress with a red sash, and crown of candles on her head, and serves these to her family. When I was little I wanted to do this so much!

On to the recipe! I found it on this excellent blog, and there's really no need for me to reproduce it here because he does it so well, except that maybe you wouldn't run across these buns at all otherwise. So I can at least introduce you to the idea of them!

Look at the beautiful yellow of this saffron-infused milk!

Lussekatter

(recipe from here)

1 gram saffron threads
16 ounces (2 cups) milk
7 cups (2 lbs. 3 ounces) all-purpose flour
2/3 c sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons instant yeast
8 ounces sour cream (room temperature)
3.5 ounces (7 tablespoons) soft butter
egg wash (1 egg mixed with 1 T. water)

pearl sugar* or coarse sugar

*I got my pearl sugar at IKEA

Crush the saffron threads with a mortar and pestle or in a bowl with the back of a spoon as best you can. Warm the milk in a medium saucepan just to the simmer and add the saffron. Stir it, turn off the heat and let it cool until it’s just warm (about body temperature).

Meanwhile, stir together the flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Pour the milk mixture into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle. Add the the sour cream and stir to combine. Add the flour steadily and stir until a dough forms. Switch to the dough hook and knead the dough about 7 minutes until it’s very elastic and comes away from the sides of the bowl. With the machine running, add the soft butter about a tablespoon at a time until it’s all incorporated.

Turn the dough out into a large bowl, cover it with a cloth and let it rise about 40 minutes or until about doubled in size. Flour a work surface, turn out the dough and cut it into 35 (or so) pieces. Roll them out into snakes about 14 inches long. Flatten the snakes slightly with a pin, then roll the strips inward from each end into an “S” shape. Lay them on parchment lined sheets to proof, about another 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, set your oven racks in the lower half of the oven and preheat to 475 degrees Fahrenheit. Paint them with egg wash and sprinkle with pearl sugar. Bake 8-12 minutes until golden.

These are really fun to roll up, even more fun than cinnamon rolls!

Seb and Abe loved helping

Here they are on the pan. Their name means "Lucia cats," and can't you imagine them as cute little cats sitting up with their tails curled? Adorable.

And ready to serve, with some hot cocoa. Yum!