Reading Buddies in January: Winter Birds, or Just Birds?
By Penny Martin.January is such a cold and boring month, which is why reading a book or two and making some crafts is a great way to pass the time. The January Reading Buddies was pretty great:11 kids came out to participate, and also vari-ous parents. In addition to Sabina and me, we had several 4-Hers helping us out: Katja and Bettina Mästle, Megan and Anita Justin, The books were cute, and everyone loved the crafts. But, we all know that -- how about a behind the scenes look instead?
At first, Sabina and I didn’t really know what the theme should be -- new years, winter, snow, robots -- we were kind of lost. We finally decided on something: winter birds, mostly because my mom had this great idea for a bird feeder craft and food is harder for birds to find in the winter, so it was perfect. However, we couldn’t find any books at the library about birds in the winter! So we had to change, but the problem with changing the theme was that we already had all of our crafts and everything planned out, so we couldn’t exactly change it. It was then that we real-ized winter birds was a stupid theme, we were going to birds, just birds! It was the greatest idea we ever had!
So, we did birds, like that was our theme. We read three books: Our Yard is Full of Birds by Anne Rockwell, A Bird is a Bird by Lizzy Rockwell, and Lucky Duck-lings by Eva Moore. The first one was about the different kinds of birds you would see in your yard throughout the year, the second was about what distinguishes a bird from any other ani-mals, and the last one was about a group of ducklings that were saved from a storm drain. We asked the kids ques-tions about the books when we were reading them too, some of them were so funny with their an-swers. Like, I asked them what are the ducks going to do if they were stuck in the storm drain, and one little girl said they were going to die -- that came out of no-where!
Our crafts were pretty cute too. We made paper birds with the kids -- they got to color in a bird cut out and a square of paper that was going to be the wings, then they folded the paper in accordeon and put it through a slit in the cutouts. We also did bird feeders, which were a mini bagel with sunflower seed butter and birdseed on top. For snack, we had birdseed for people, or make your own trail mix. The whole thing was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to run another Reading Buddies!
