Christmas for the Birds

This week I read my students the book, The Birds of Bethlehem.  I found this book on Amazon and I absolutely love the story and the illustrations.  The students really enjoy it as well.  It's fun to watch their faces as they realize this story is about Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus.  They still haven't figured out that almost all I read in December are stories about the first Christmas.  

When we finished the book, we read our Act of Kindness card which was to feed the birds.  The kids were very excited about this idea.  When I told them we were making Candy Cane bird feeders they nearly flipped out.  I found this simple idea on Pinterest (of course.)  It was so easy for the kids to do themselves.  

The only materials you need are red pipe cleaners and Cheerios.  I twisted the bottom for them so the Cheerios would not just slip off and the students did all the work.  We found a small tree by the playground and put our candy cane bird feeders in it.  The kids check on the feeders every recess.  It's hard to see the bird feeders in this photo it was a foggy day so my picture did not turn out good.

Here is a close up photo from Pinterest.

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Another good book I found on Amazon is The Message of the Birds.  This is an adorable book with the message  of spreading peace in the world during Christmas and all year long.   

My students just love hearing literature with the story of Jesus in it.  I also read the book No Two Alike and we had a discussion about each person being unique and different.  That's how God made us and we should celebrate that!

We finished out the week making a wintery art project that I found on Pinterest.  

Day 1:  We used a scraper and scraped black paint across white paper and we used q-tips and white paint to make the snowflakes on the blue paper.

Day 2:  We torn apart the white/black paper to make tree trunks and glued them down.  I gave each child a 1/2 sheet of red paper and orange scraps to make the birds.  We talked about what shapes we might use to make our birds.  

This one is my favorites.  It was made by KB, she is one of my favorite students this year.   She tries so hard and you can tell that she is doing her best on everything.  I don't know how her birds got so small.