Parrot Week

What the heck do you plan for a whole week of parrot themed activities? Well, I'll tell you what we did.

I asked Thing One what it is about parrots that interest him and that helped me figure out where to go with our studies. He wanted to know more about talking birds.

Our book list:

Princess Penelope's Parrot by Lester

Beastly Feast by Goldstone

Talking Birds by Flanagan

Parrots by Altman

We listened to Nonsense Poems and Stories on CD by Edward Lear

We had a pirate day. We read pirate books and dressed up like a pirate.

Our pirate book list:

Pirates Eat Porridge by Morgan

Tough Boris by Fox
Pirates by Lamm

For crafts, we stuck feathers in a styrofoam ball and glued googly eyes on it for a parrot head. We printed out some parrot bookmarks, colored them, and laminated them.

We looked at and felt real feathers, looked at a picture of different sizes and shapes of feathers, and learned the parts of a feather. We talked about the different ways that feathers help birds, and the different ways that people use feathers. We talked about types of beaks and why different birds have different kinds of beaks.

We watched silly videos of birds talking and playing and bathing in the sink on youtube.com. We watched volume one of David Attenborough's Life of Birds but Thing One declared it "boring." I think he doesn't have quite the attention span for it yet. I thought it was fascinating.

We played a parrot game, where one person was the bird owner and one person was the parrot and repeated everything the owner said.

And I saved the best for last. We got to visit a friend who owns a 12 year old African Meyer parrot named Oscar. The boys got to pet and hold him. He knows how to shake hands which they thought was soooo cooool. They fed him tortilla chips.

We tried a new kind of puzzle for our treasure hunt this week. I put a clue into code that had five letters in it "Mom's room" (five counting the apostrophe). Each day after finishing his first workbox puzzle, he got the key to one letter in the week-long puzzle (?=M for example). By the end of the week he had the puzzle solved and found the treasure chest. I gave him a "Canadian Oreo", a maple cream cookie that daddy brought back from Canada this week.

We also found a venus fly trap at the local garden center and Thing One is so excited about his new "pet." He is thinking up a name for it, and chasing house flies to feed it.