🐦Birds 🌳Forest Habitat DIY ♻️Recycled 🚽Toilet Paper Craft with 🔢Math Twist

We are longing for Spring, so today, we are upcycling by making a DIY Bird forest habitat craft with recycled toilet and towel paper rolls. As a base, we are using a white iPad packing insert. 

We are also using marbles, stones, moss and other finds we have collected during our nature walks.

Use the exactor knife to cut the holes out.

To make our forest, we painted some trees with white poster paint to resemble birch trees. To make other types of deciduous trees, Adrian mixed the red and green washable finger paints to make the color brown. (He loved mixing colors ~ we ended up mixing many more others! Hooray to sensorial color exploration!)For our forest habitat, we are using backyard birds including a woodpecker, indigo bunting, red cardinal,  warbler, and a blue jay. To finish the birch trees, I used a black Sharpie and then applied another coat of white paint to some parts.
Many birds migrate as the weather changes to access a greater variety of food and have an ideal habitat for nesting, but many backyard birds stay around all year long. They are often known as resident birds.We also talked about spring and birds' Nesting Cycle. More than 700 bird species breed in North America, and the variations in their behaviors are fascinatingly complex. Different species find mates, build nests, lay eggs, and raise their young chicks in incredibly different ways. Did you know that throughout the year, most birds use day length to tell what season it is? When the number of hours of daylight exceeds a certain critical level, physiological changes are triggered in birds which prepare them to breed. (Read more here.)  In forests, tree holes are created either by woodpeckers or more slowly as trees age and begin to decay. Birds like owls, songbirds, and parrots make homes in the holes of trees because they offer safe environments for sleeping, reproduction and raising young chicks.We commonly see red cardinals, blue jays, and woodpeckers in our backyard. We barely see Yellow Wabler though. Actually, Prothonotary Warbler, unlike other warblers, makes its nest in tree holes within the southern swamplands. This is probably because the normal warbler nesting spot of dense bushes is scarce.

Also, add a math twist and offer your child to add or subtract birds as they fly in or out the tree holes.
We also referred to these bird cards to discover the diversity of birds across North America.

For more on birds, see here our 🐦Bird Unit Study 📚Books and Materials.