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To me, birds are a nearly perfect teaching tool. They offer us a form of natural play, sparking joy as one ventures out to spot a migrating species or looks up to note a Red-tailed Hawk circling overhead. They inspire a curiosity about air and flight, migration and time, breeding and survival. They have the potential to connect us to the natural world and make us aware of our shared habitat. In the right moment, they can excite an almost transcendental experience in me, much like a good book, where I feel as if I’ve entered into an other-worldly magic.

While I don’t expect every child to fall in love with birds, I do expect there to be something about birds that will spark a curiosity in every child. Whether it is in exploring how things fly, charting migration patterns across the world, or designing feeders that can outsmart the wiliest squirrel. A bird inquiry also offers many cross-curricular learning opportunities, and a chance for students to take their learning outside and make real-world connections. Each child may not fall in love with birds, but a well-designed inquiry will teach them how to fall in love with learning, so when they find what they love they can explore it in all its richness.

There are many excellent ways to begin a classroom inquiry, but with a bird inquiry I believe that early on you want to get students outside observing birds in the real world. In spring and autumn (migration season), this can look like taking students out to the playground, a nearby park or ravine, or on a field trip, to collect bird sightings, which leads to a data set for students to work with. In the winter, it can begin by laying out seed and observing which birds and other creatures show up. When students begin to observe birds, questions will naturally arise and as they uncover their own curiosities, their questions can begin to direct the learning.

Collecting Bird Sightings

There is a timeless instinct in children to collect things, particularly things found in nature. Perhaps you, or someone you know, had a collection of shells or rocks, each a little different, each connected to a particular moment in time. Lekies, Beery, and Brensinger (2017) describe the positive impact these collections have on children’s relationship to nature, as well as their analytical and critical thinking skills. Children pay close attention to their collections, often finding different ways to sort and understand them.

Today, we may caution our kids to leave the rock or shell behind, encouraging them to be aware of the footprint they leave on a space. At the same time, we are bombarded with collectible commercial goods. A study out of the UK found many children had a much easier time identifying Pokémon than local plant and animal species, demonstrating that children continue to have a desire to learn and categorize, and that they are also currently more likely to engage this instinct with the synthetic rather than the natural (MacFarlane, 2017).
 

Lesson 1: Birding Field Trip

Recording Bird Sightings

Recording bird sightings represents an ideal development of natural naming skills, accompanied by the playful instinct to collect and categorize. As children learn to identify species by shape, colour, size, and sound, they begin to notice and distinguish common sightings from rarer sightings, leading to the collection of a greater and greater range of species. They can get hooked and join Birders the world over in search of “lifers,” birds seen by a bird watcher for the first time in their life.

Students’ sightings become an excellent source of data, which they can explore to ask questions ranging from “Which bird did we see the most of today?” to “Which bird species are in decline and why?”
 

Lesson 2: Getting to Know eBird

Architecture challenge: A squirrel proof bird feeder

Feeding birds in the winter, if done responsibly, offers an opportunity to support declining bird populations by increasing their winter survival rate. It also presents an amazing opportunity to get a good look at lots of winter birds on a regular basis. Researching and designing a bird feeding station is a great chance for students to apply measurement, research, design, and financial literacy skills to a real-world problem.

Feeding birds can begin with scattering seed on the ground and watching to see who shows up. Often squirrels are the first visitors, gobbling up all the seed before any birds get to it. This presents an excellent design challenge: can students use recyclables to make a feeder that will feeds the birds and not the squirrels?

If you haven’t fed birds before, you may be surprised to discover just how difficult a task this is. Squirrels are incredibly acrobatic, clever, and persistent creatures, and the display they will put on ensuring they get to the seed is well worth watching. This project offers students a chance to design and redesign a project, and then watch squirrels also apply their problem-solving skills to each new design.
 

Lesson 3: The Feeder Project