Week 4: Rule Bending Birds

So, a little bit of background, I work as a Temporary Recreation Aide at a County Park in Central Florida.  When I first was hired last September, basically my job was to show up, do what they tell me, and answer the phones all day.  Around October, my old boss essentially got promoted (I think he got elected to some sort of environmental council, but I'm not sure), and after about a month or two of limbo, our new boss came in with a vision to make the park even more interactive.

One of the new things he wanted to start was to have themed months, where each month on Thursdays and Saturdays, we would have a craft and activity in the Nature Center that revolved around the month's theme that people could come in and do and learn a little about the theme while also having fun.

January's theme was birds.  I was tasked with coming up with 4 bird-themed crafts to set up and have kids come around and make to take home.  I must have a pretty great job if I get to browse Pinterest for hours and get paid for it.

I wound up compiling a list of crafts, 3 from Pinterest, 1 original, in the last few weeks of December.  Even though I came up with these crafts before the year started, I decided to include them in this blog because, after all, I do sort of work for the government, and funding is often hard to come by, so a lot of these crafts were designed with minimal buying and instead utilizing what we already had.  So I hope you'll forgive me for not using my own stash, but I am cramming 4 weeks worth of crafts in one.

I'll come back to Week 1 at the end since that's really my pride and joy.

Week 2's craft was to make paper bag owl puppets.  They're pretty generic.  Take a paper lunch bag, glue on some circles for eyes, glue on some wing shapes I cut out, glue on some triangles for the beak, glue on feathers, and then draw on pupils, feathers, and a tongue on the lower beak.  For the sneaky educational part, I took come clipart of lizards, fish, and mice, and glued one picture to the inside of each paper bag, so that the kids could look inside and see what their owl ate.

Week 3's craft was clothespin birds.  I originally saw these on Pinterest and thought they were really cute.  Basically, just draw a bird on a clothespin, then glue a feather on the back of it.  I found it much easier to make sure the fuzzy part of the feather was glued on, because the stem didn't take the glue well and tended to pop off.  I also found just shoving a feather in the hinge was secure and gave the bird wings instead of a tail.  I don't really remember the educational message I tried to drive home, but I think it was to just think about how birds move objects.  They don't have hands, so they have to use either their feet or their beaks.

Week 4's craft was paper plate birds.  Take a paper plate, cut it in half, draw a head on one half, and a body on the other, then glue them together.  Then, cut out some tissue paper strips, and glue them on the back to give the bird a very long tail.  This educational concept was more for some of the older kids since it needs a little more attention to talk about, but this introduces the handicap theory in terms of evolution.  Basically, birds with really long tails would be really easy to catch if you were a predator, right? But sexual selection tends to favor birds with really long tails.  Long story short, there's an optimal length where the tail is not too long so that it can be caught easily, but long enough that potential mates see "Oh wow, he's got a super long tail and he hasn't been eaten by anything yet.  He must be so strong and have really good genes that can be passed on to our offspring."

Which brings us back to week 1, my masterpiece, Build-a-Bird.  This craft allowed us to start to talk about adaptations, and advantages and disadvantages of different ones.  There were three types of beaks, wings, and legs that kids could choose from and make their own Franken-Bird.  We got to talk about what kind of food the bird would eat, where it would live, how it would get its food, and how much it would fly.

My boss took care of all of the purchasing, but I'm pretty sure the only things we needed to buy were clothespins and feathers.  We had all the other cardstock, markers, crayons, paper plates, paper bags, glue, and tissue paper.

So this is where I'm cheating a bit.  Technically, I didn't buy anything myself, nor did I ask my boss to buy it, so I'm clocking in this project at $0. As a hush offering, as soon as I get my scanner hooked up, I'm scanning in the templates that I made for the Build-a-Bird and the Owl Puppet handouts as a free download for you all if you want.

Week 4 budget: $1.92

Week 4 spent: $0

Week 4 leftover: $1.92

January budget: $8.33

January spent: $10.57

January leftover: -$2.24

Year budget: $100

Year spent: $10.57

Year left: $89.43