Nature Journal: Birds, Nests, and Eggs

Last week we studied birds, nests, and eggs in my nature journaling classes. We focused on three of our most common birds here in central Indiana: the cardinal, redwing blackbird, and robin. 

The redwing blackbird appeared in our area about 3 weeks ago. We all just love his colorful wings. His female counterpart is a speckled brown and I wouldn't really recognize her!

The younger children in the class can often complete up to four drawings in the hour we have! Here is Laura's invention after she had painted the regular birds:

Since birds rarely re-use their nests it was safe for me to take a few nests from our woods for the kids to see in person. It turns out we found two cardinal nests in the woods. Cardinal nests have four specific layers: rough twigs, a leaf mat, grapevine bark, grasses. The nests we had showed these four layers very distinctly and I couldn't believe all the grapevine bark in use!

I always love seeing everyone's different drawings each week. I usually want to frame about 5 of them. By now my walls would be entirely covered.

In the older class we talked specifically about how to paint nests and eggs. It is always wonderful to see people putting things into practice.

I love how 3-D this nest became!

Everyone had fun with the speckled eggs.

A sort of collage page combining a number of elements:

An Egg Is Quiet by Dianna Aston is the book we read aloud in class and then practiced painting eggs from. It is beautifully illustrated in watercolors and was the best guide to bird eggs I could find! I was quite disappointed that bird eggs don't appear in most bird guides. All the books in this series are well worth owning!

And that's it for this week's nature lesson. I can't wait to show you are spring bulb study!

Please note this post contains affiliate links.