Rhyming Prompt: December 3
I went out for a walk in the chilly dawn
And I noticed some friends hanging out on the lawn,
There were several small birds, cuddled up for heat,
And they mentioned that they would like something to eat!
In the spirit of giving, I thought we could make
A festive bird feeder of which they’d partake.
Download the first four prompts here as a PDF, or here as a Microsoft Word document (you may have already printed these—I’m just re-posting them here for convenience).
A closeup image of the prompt for December 3, nestled in a lit Christmas tree. It is printed on cream cardstock with a green border, and has a red wax seal of a frog highlighted in gold.
Other Materials:
Pinecones gathered with your kids on a nature walk
Peanut butter, suet, lard, or vegetable shortening
Birdseed
String or twine (8-10 inches)
Suggested Pose:
Frantz is ready for birdwatching at our house!
A picture of Frantz the frog sitting in a windowsill. He is wearing a pair of kids binoculars around his neck, and has the December 3 prompt beside him along with an old copy of A Guide to Field Identification: Birds of North America.
Activity:
Smear the sticky stuff on the pinecone, roll it in seeds, tie it with twine, and hang it up high, hopefully where no neighborhood cats are likely to lurk. Then watch the fun! More detailed directions (and some choice hints, like heat your peanut butter for easier application) can be found here.
I’ll also be looking at our local bird book and this article, which does a great job of helping you identify your local birds if you’re in Oregon and aren’t already an expert.
While we are observing the birds, I’m planning to ask the kids lots of pointed questions about how the birds’ use their bodies. Birds have eyes on the sides of their heads, not in front; how does this impact how they see the bird feeder? How does this change how they move? Birds are believed to have better color perception than humans; let’s make up colors you wish you could see! How do they move their wings when they aren’t in flight? How do you think it would feel to grip a branch that way with your toes? This can be under the guise of trying to identify the birds if your kids are older or reluctant.
Once the bird feeder loses some of its allure, I’m going to suggest to the kids that we pretend to be birds for a bit. Because my kids are two and four, this will be a rambunctious and messy event, complete with sloppy construction paper wings, leaping between couches, and scream-squawking. Why would I want to do this to myself and my furniture? Read on.
Rationale:
My kids, like most, are totally enamored by animals. “I care for all animals,” my four-year-old insists while refusing to eat a bite of chicken. But despite this, she’s still likely to get overexcited and play too roughly with our ancient, fifteen-pound dog. In his book The Age of Empathy, biologist Frans de Waal notes that while chimps will imitate the behavioral routines of adult humans, it can take a year to teach them a simple set of actions, while human children can learn the same thing in an afternoon. He suggests the time lapse is not just because the children are more intelligent than the apes, but because the chimps are being asked to relate across species lines, which is always a bigger challenge (de Waal, 2009). Feeding birds is a fun, festive wintertime activity, but I’m hoping the close avian observation can also lead to some improved cross-species relations.
By asking our kids to think carefully about what it feels like to live in a bird’s body, we are helping them to imagine the (esoteric word alert, but bear with me) Umwelt of the animal. The Umwelt is a German word for perceptual environment, and it acknowledges that our sensory capabilities influence how we make sense of the world around us. I first encountered the concept of the Umwelt in the work of Jakob von Uexküll, who believed that by studying the biological apparatus of specific animals you could develop plausible theories of how they experienced the world. His ideas have been taken up by more widely-read philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Giorgio Agamben, and led to the formation of the field of biosemiotics. To put this simply, von Uexküll believed that we cannot relate to others if we imagine them to be just like us, only different. Only when we can truly imagine the lived experience of inhabiting a body with different abilities and limitations than our own can we capably empathize with and understand them.
My kids like to pretend to be puppies, but their go-to imaginative games are more heavily informed by Disney than by our actual dogs. That’s still an important and creative stage of childhood development, but I feel confident that a little direction will help them take it to the next level. Right now they don’t really consider how dogs and cats behave, and they’re certainly not perspective-taking in any meaningful capacity. By asking them to think carefully about how the world interacts with the birds’ senses, we’re playing a fun game and constructing a phenomenological schema that will help them think more deeply about other beings experiences.
Book Recommendation:
We’ll dig into Curious Kids Nature Guide: Explore the Amazing Outdoors of the Pacific Northwest, by Fiona Cohen and Marni Fylling for this activity. It’s one of my all-time favorite books to read with my kids (along with Julia Rothman’s Anatomy books). It always helps them ask and answer excellent questions about the world they inhabit.
A copy of the book Curious Kids Nature Guide on a tufted gray ottoman.
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