Real Life Science

Today we learned about physical and behavioral adaptations of animals. According to the state, it is essential for students to know about things such as migration, animal defense, movements, camouflage, hibernation, as well as parts of animals that help them to survive. We watched an awesome little video from Discovery Channel that explained lots of these in great detail, and the kids were loving the lesson. As we were busy learning, these little guys below showed up at the bird feeder just outside our window. This is an actual pic I snapped. Immediately the kids were drawn to them. They thought that they were seeing 2 different kinds of birds. I explained to them that both of these were "red" birds, but one is a male and one is a female.




We watched for about 10 minutes and saw the red one (the boy) begin to feed the female. It was so neat to see this. We decided to look them up on kidrex.org I am so glad we did!! The first picture that came up was a pic of exactly what we had just seen... a boy red bird feeding a girl. The caption under the pic read, "A behavioral adaptation of red birds is that the males feed the females during courtship." I could not have planned a lesson any better. For 30 minutes we had talked about behavioral adaptations, and there, in living color, with 2 perfectly timed birds, we witnessed it. I hope the kids will never forget this. It was so cool! We found some sound bites of the birds online and played them over and over. The birds stayed there between the tree and bird feeder for about an hour. It was indeed a great day of learning in Room 102!