B is for Birds

We are very excited to be helping to start our own DIY Club in our homeschool group.  If you are not familiar with DIY Club, it is a great way for kids to learn new skills and earn virtual (or real) patches for their hard work.

We had our first meeting this week, and I picked the Ornithology badge as our first work together.  The kids can work on whatever patches they would like to individually or with their family, but we are going to concentrate on a patch each month with our club.

Each kiddo must complete 3 of the suggested challenges in order to earn this badge.  They each are responsible to upload their projects to the DIY website under their user name.  (Makes a leaders job very easy...lol)

Joey was struggling that day, and we barely made it through the meeting.  There were 10 kids for our first meeting, and there are 25 already signed up.  The nice thing about our meetings are that you don't have to be at every one of them...lol.

At our first meeting though, We talked about our Club's logo.  And then discussed the various parts of the bird.  They each had a printout that they labeled (Requirement done).  We talked about their feathers, bones and where they live and what they eat.

And since we were locked out of the nature center that day, we went on a walk in hopes of seeing and identifying local birds.

We were not successful in seeing too many birds.  Our noisy train through the park made it impossible to see a bird.  So we went and sat in the Bird Blind in hopes of seeing birds at the Window area.....

One hearing impaired Nuthatcher flew up to get a drink....lol.  When I say that, it's because this was a loud day :)  So the bird either couldn't hear, or plain just didn't care.

Very excited.  We have two more meetings.  Going to dissect owl pellets at our next meeting.

Be sure to check out DIY.org.  Great opportunity for kids and parents to do some different things.