Materials Needed: small bird pattern (we got ours here), scissors, tape, tongue depressors, black paper, another colored paper (for eyes), pencil (or white crayon) and markers.
1. Cut out the bird pattern and trace it twice using a pencil or white crayon onto the black paper. Cut out the black birds.
2. My son loves to color, so he wanted to color the blackbirds. He did that while I cut out the eyes (one for each bird).
3. Tape the eyes onto the bird's head.
4. Attached the bird to the tongue depressor using tape.
5. Time to sing and rhyme!
We also made a little nest to go along with our rhyme out of scrap paper
6. We started by learning the rhyme, Two Little Blackbirds, that we found here.
TWO LITTLE BLACKBIRDS
Way up high in a big old tree,
Two little black birds smiled at me.
The first one said, “Let’s fly away.”
The second one said, “I think I will stay”
So the first flew off, way up high
To look for rainbows in the sky.
The second bird stayed and built a nest.
She loved the tree.
She thought it best.
Each was happy in its own way.
One chose to go, one chose to stay.
7. Next we acted out the rhyme. I read it while my son and I made our blackbirds fly away or go to their nests.
our flowers were the tree
We acted the rhyme out for a little while and then we sang the song "Two Little Blackbirds" that we found here (shown below). My son would've loved to sing this song all night long.
There was no targeted language goal with this activity, but both the rhyme and song focus on the concept of rhyming which is a really important skill for kids to learn because it will help them later with reading and writing. We also talked about the blackbird and acting out the blackbird rhyme and doing the blackbird fingerplay helped my son to understand the language he was hearing better.