DIY Homeschooler

Bird World by Eleanor Stickney is a delightful resource for nature study for young children. Stickney was the author of a series of readers. For this book, she enlisted the help of Ralph Hoffmann, author of several guide books on birds. Naturalist Ernest Seton Thomas provided the illustrations. The whole lives up to its subtitle, A Bird Book for Children.

The birds included in the book are those common to most parts of the United States, but with a New England area emphasis, and are described through simple observation occasionally accentuated with lines of verse.

Besides these descriptions of specific species of birds, basic information about birds is also scattered throughout — beaks, nests, eggs, feet, what birds eat, moulting, migration, predators, feathers, wings, and songs — making this a very valuable first introduction.

An identification guide in the appendix also enables the book to be used as a guide book of sorts.

Free eBook

• Read online
• PDF
• Various formats (Kindle, EPUB)

Suggestions

• There are 68 chapters (not counting the verses). By covering one chapter twice each week, you have a full school year’s worth of nature studies.
• Alternatively, by reading a chapter each day four times each week, you’ll have one semester’s worth of nature studies.
• This book lends itself very well to creating a notebooking page for each topic. Illustrate each bird with a summation of the information learned added below.
• There are several diagrams in the book that will make excellent additions to the bird notebook.
• Also be sure to have your child copy one or two of the verses, and illustrate if desired.
• Make an investigation sheet and include sightings of the birds mentioned.

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Additional Resources

Audubon: A Unit Study
All kinds of resources including coloring pages, notebooking pages, activities, and more!

Bird lessons from our Our Wonderful World book study where you’ll find more book recommendations, activities, printables, and more:

• Hunting Birds With Eyes & Camera
• Bird Guardians
• Landlord to the Birds

Bird Facts
Free notebooking page from HomeschoolNotebooking.com that includes space to record the name of the bird, information on its habitat, how to recognize the bird, the food it eats, and where it nests. There is a map with a symbol key for recording the bird’s range (year round, summer, and winter) and room for a picture/photo of the bird. One of the better bird notebooking pages we’ve come across.

Birds Index
Quite a growing collection of bird-related resources!