Bird Song Video

Our neighborhood doesn't have all of the birds in this video, but I think this will be a helpful resource as the kids and I work to differentiate between different bird calls:

Killdeer Birds in the Neighborhood

For my birthday, my sister E gave me a pair of binoculars to help aid our birdwatching as we go on neighborhood walks. The kids have liked using the binoculars, too, and I think it has made our quarantine experience a little more varied. During our morning walk yesterday morning, we noticed some birds with distinctive peeps that were running around in the housing development that is under construction at the bottom of our hill. It clearly looked like a mother bird was trying to out to her baby.

Then today we saw the same mother bird again, but she started to act really strange. She crept down, puffed out her tail feathers to look larger and revel russet-colored rump feathers underneath. For a moment, we thought she was going to come toward us! We kept walking, and it became apparent that she was trying to keep us away from her babies that were walking further down the road.

We figured out that these birds are called Killdeer, and they actually have a very distinctive sound (see video clip below). Our book describes the call as: kill-dee, kill-dee, kill-deer, but I don't really hear that.

This video of the mother bird defending her nest is a little similar to what we experienced this morning:

Maps of Fantasy Lands

A week or two ago, Sam and Lucy spend their "Creative Time" part of the school day creating different drawings. Sam created an elaborate map that was inspired by Lord of the Rings and Narnia maps, and I'm really tickled by how Sam took the pains to write everything in a fancy script. He usually doesn't take so much time to carefully draw and write! They have been carrying Sam's map around, along with a long wooden staff and a magic spell book, as part of a pretend magic game.

After a few days Lucy decided to make her own map too. You can see that she tried to section of her land to look similar to Sam's map, but the creative names for her lands are very much her own ideas. You can tell she is trying to appeal to Sam by having a "Cello Land" in the upper right corner. I'm really glad that she was so excited to work on this map. It has been difficult to get to her to be motivated to practice her handwriting (we had a standoff about how to write the lower-case letter "g" last week), but she wanted to write her letter forms carefully when she worked on this map.

I am so grateful that these two get along so well and have fun pretending with each other, especially during this lockdown when they don't get to see their friends from school. Lucy thinks Sam is really funny. Today she was thoroughly amused when Sam kept pretending that Lucy said "plants are gross" when she actually said "plant grows." He knows how to make her laugh, puts up her demands, and overall they have a good time together.