Birds and Kevin Henkes

We had so much fun with birds this week that I wanted to share it with you.

We read Birds, written by Kevin Henkes and illustrated by his wife, Laura Dronzek.

 

It is such a special book to read and share with children. Look at these pages!



If there are lots of birds in a tree, and they all fly away at the same time, it looks like the tree yelled,

 SURPRISE!



This page was maybe my favorite to share with the children. We talked about all different types of birds and the colors they may leave in the sky, if their feathers left marks. I had seen an idea from Ready, Set, Read with feather painting and feather patterning to go along with this story. I just loved the idea of feather painting!

I made this paper so that we could make our own feather paintings. I printed it on light blue for the sky color.  If you would like a copy, just click on the picture.

 I let the kids  use different feathers for yellow, blue, and red paint. 

These paint bricks worked really well. I just had to remind the kids to be a little careful "flying" over the words- so we could still read them.  

I  also made a bulletin board in the hall with some of our artwork. I had the children only paint the feather marks on the paper for the bulletin board, and then tell me which birds they chose to make the marks. 

As I called a couple children at a time up to paint , the other children worked on this Types of Birds Easy Reader from Debi Forsyth.  It is free at her TPT store.  

I made this little paper to go along with her book, to show the children what each bird really looked like, so they could use it as a guide as they colored their books.  If you would like a copy of my bird pictures, just click on the picture below.  

I actually saved the page as a picture, and printed it out as a 5x7 picture, just to save some ink.  Then, I cut each one in half (since there are two strips on each page) and stapled a strip right onto the cover of each child's book.

The books came out so sweet!

My post about Birds and Bird Nests has LOTS of other bird ideas you might like to use.

This is my  Bird and Bird Nest Prezi at my TPT store, if you would like that, too.  I used it to show the pictures of the birds we talked about before we made our books. The children loved choosing which birds they would pretend left marks in the sky. 

I also just updated my Author's Prezi and listed it at my TPT store.  I included Kevin Henkes because I LOVE him and his books.  I use so many of his books throughout the year. The children loved learning more about him- and seeing some of his work.  The other authors I have included in my Prezi are  Eric Carle, Theodor Geisel, David Shannon, Jan Brett, Laura Numeroff, Donald Crews, Shel Silverstein, Norman Bridwell, Robert Munsch, and  Mo Willems.

Thank you for stopping by!