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Home Education Magazine
January-February 1997 - Columns
Good Stuff - Rebecca Rupp
Feed the Birds
It's fine to feed the birds all year round, but a wonderful time to start is right now, in the heart of winter, when seeds are sparse and those birds who didn't hightail it south in September really need a helping hand. Books for potential bird feeders include Edward Baldwin's Birdfeeders, Shelters, and Baths (Storey Publishing, 1990), which includes plans for several different birdfeeders using easy-come-by materials such as juice bottles and tin cans; and Beverly Courtney Crook's Invite a Bird to Dinner: Simple Feeders You Can Make (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard; 1978), which includes instructions for very simple birdfeeders for beginners, among them an egg-carton feeder, a sugar sipper for hummingbirds (save that one for spring), and directions for turning your discarded Christmas tree into a bird banquet hall. Neil Dawe's The Bird Book & Feeder (Workman, 1988) goes a step further: the book, a kid-sized field guide to 24 common birds, comes with a small plastic feeder, suitable for hanging from a backyard tree or attaching to a windowsill. (The Bird Book & Feeder is available from the ETA catalog, 620 Lakeview Parkway, Vernon Hills, IL 60061; (800) 445-5985.) For those who prefer a hands-on birdfeeder experience, the Nature Company (P.O. Box 188, Florence, KY 41022; (800) 227-1114) sells a "Tweet Treat Kit" ($12.00) for kids aged 8 and up: the kit includes materials for assembling five simple birdfeeders, plus recipes for filling them. Users will learn how to make such goodies as millet muffins, sunflower cookies, and suet.
Even more bird-food recipes can be found in Helen and Dick Witty's Feed the Birds (Workman, 1991), which comes with its own little red mesh bird-food bag.
Susan Bosnak's Science Is... (Scholastic, 1991), a 500+-page collection of science facts and projects for kids aged 6 to 14, includes a number of creative activities for young bird-lovers: kids are encouraged to play a game of "Migration Race," to try bird-calling, to make bird-track potato prints, to study bird flight patterns, and to determine bird "fright distances" - that is, just how close can you get to a bird before it flies away? Suggestions are also included for constructing several simple birdfeeders, among them the extremely basic pinecone feeder: smear a pinecone heavily with peanut butter, roll it in mixed seeds, tie a string around it, and hang it from a porch roof, branch, or clothesline. Pamela Hickman's Birdwise (Addison-Wesley, 1988) is another excellent source of projects for junior birders: Hickman includes instructions for making coconut, suet log, and onion bag birdfeeders, along with the recipe for "Super Seed Salad" gourmet bird food. Our favorite bird book, however - a shamefully biased choice - is Everything You Never Learned About Birds by Rebecca Rupp (Storey Publishing, 1995): bird science and lore for readers of all ages, stuffed with hands-on projects, color illustrations, diagrams, photographs, and bird book bibliographies. Also included: suggestions for constructing several different types of birdfeeders, recipes for suet, hummingbird nectar, and "George Washington's Breakfast for the Birds," and an account of bird dietary habits, along with an explanation of how a pink flamingo is like a blue whale.
To identify all the hungry guests at your birdfeeder, you'll probably need an illustrated field guide, of which there are many varieties available. Among the most popular are the Peterson guides - A Field Guide to Western Birds (Houghton Mifflin, 1961) and A Field Guide to Birds East of the Rockies (Houghton Mifflin, 1980), both by ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson; and the Audubon guides - The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Vol. I by John Bull and John Farrand, Jr. (Knopf, 1977) and Vol. II by Miklos D.F. Udvardy (Knopf, 1977). These are all excellent, but are definitely adult books. A series of field guides specifically for kids is published by Houghton Mifflin: the "Peterson First Guides," of which there are several volumes, including Fishes, Reptiles and Amphibians, Insects, and Mammals, as well as Birds. Klutz Press also publishes a bird guide for the young, Everybody's Everywhere Backyard Bird Book, an 86-page-long spiral-bound guide to common backyard birds, illustrated with color photographs. (The book comes with an attached birdcall.) The kids' guides are attractive, but our experience indicates that if you're planning to invest in a field guide, go for the adult model: younger kids, with a little adult help, quickly learn to use them effectively, and they contain a lot more birds.
For an up-close experience with less common birds, you might try bird coloring books, several of which are available, inexpensively, from Dover Publications. (For a catalog, contact Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, NY 11501.) Titles include the State Birds and Flowers Coloring Book (Annika Bernhard), Fifty Favorite Birds Coloring Book (Lisa Bonforte), Tropical Birds Coloring Book (Lucia DeLeiris), Birds of Prey Coloring Book (John Green), and Audubon's Birds of America Coloring Book. Dover also publishes an Audubon sticker book (Audubon Bird Stickers in Full Color): 50 full-color bird stickers in an eight-page booklet.
Books about true-to-life kids and their experiences with birds include Felice Holman's Elisabeth the Birdwatcher (Macmillan, 1963) in which Elisabeth builds a birdfeeder, battles a persistent feeder-raiding squirrel, and learns a lot about backyard birds, and Jane Yolen's Owl Moon (Philomel, 1987), an enchanting picture book in which a little girl goes on a night walk in the woods with her father, looking for owls. Real-life bird books for older readers include Farley Mowat's delightful Owls in the Family, an autobiographical account of his adopted boyhood pets, Wol and Weeps, and Margaret Stanger's That Quail, Robert (J.B. Lippincott, 1966), the true story of an adopted quail who answers the telephone, eats at the dining room table, and sleeps in the Christmas tree. For legendary birds, young readers might enjoy the American Indian bird tales in Natalia Belting's The Long-Tailed Bear and Other Indian Legends (Bobbs, 1961), among them "How the Birds Came to Have Their Many Colors," "Why Crane's Feathers Are Brown and Otter Doesn't Feel the Cold," and "How Turkey Got His White Tail Feathers;" or the multicultural bird stories in Maria Leach's How the People Sang the Mountains Up: How and Why Stories (Viking, 1967), including "Why Birds Are Different Colors" and "Why Robin Has a Red Breast." Individual bird legend books include Barbara Knudson's How the Guinea Fowl Got Her Spots: A Swahili Tale of Friendship (Carolrhoda, 1990); Agentina Palacios's The Hummingbird King: A Guatemalan Legend (Troll Associates, 1993), Joanna Troughton's How the Birds Changed Their Feathers: A South American Indian Folk Tale (Peter J. Bedrick, 1986), Katherine Paterson's The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks (Lodestar, 1990), and Terry Cohlene's Ka-ha-si and the Loon (Watermill Press, 1990).
Games for bird-lovers include The Orchard Game from Animal Town (P.O. Box 485, Healdsburg, CA 95448; (800) 445-8642). In this simple cooperative boardgame for kids aged 3 and up, players attempt to fill little baskets with tiny wooden fruits - apples, plums, pears, and cherries - gathered from the trees on the playing board before the hungry raven in the center of the board eats them all up. Who eats what is determined by the roll of a bird-and-fruit patterned die, and bird-lovers, the instructions explain sympathetically, can leave a few pieces of fruit on the trees for the bird. For older players, Ampersand Press (8040 NE Day Road West, #5-A, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110; (206) 780-9015) publishes The Hummingbird Game, a strategy game in which players attempt to pair hummingbird cards - each portraying a different hummingbird species, beautifully illustrated in full color - to its favored flowers, insects, geographical range, and ecological habitat.
Once you start feeding the birds, post a checklist on the refrigerator and record all the birds that visit your yard. We've collected several year's-worth of these now, reaching back to the days when much smaller kids reported sightings of "RED BERD" and "CHIKADE" - this year, I notice, among all the cardinals, grosbeaks, and juncos, some scientifically suspect person claims to have seen a pterodactyl. Give it a try yourself - birdfeeding can be as simple as scattering breadcrusts and sunflower seeds in a likely plot of snow. (Many birds prefer that anyway; some are ground-feeders.) It's interesting; it's educational; it's scientifically mind-broadening. And it's a very good deed.
Bethump'd With Words
Bethump'd is a board game for lovers of the English language. Each round, explains the included rule booklet, "is an enjoyable journey through the origins, history and evolution of our mother tongue." The game title is a quote from William Shakespeare, arguably the all-time greatest practitioner of English: in the play King John, Richard Plantagenet exclaims, "Zounds! I was never so bethump'd with words since I first called my brother's father dad." Players - preparing to be similarly bethump'd - proceed around an alphabetical playing path, past portraits of various linguistic VIPs (among them Samuel Johnson, Geoffrey Chaucer, Noah Webster, and Mark Twain), attempting to land on each letter of a designated Game Word. Each letter of the chosen Word is "won" by both landing on the letter's space and correctly answering a question from The 1000 Question Cards. It's through the Question Cards that the real word bethumping occurs: cards are sorted into 6 different levels (from Level I, relatively easy, to Level VI, challengingly difficult) and some 30 different language categories, among them "Acronyms," "Borrowed Words," "Briticisms," "Eponyms," "History," "Homophones," "Idioms," "Nicknames," "Sexist English," "Slang," and "Word Origins." Try these examples:
"In England, what is a lift?"
"What common name for peanut did English borrow from the African Bantu language?"
"What nickname for a New Zealander is also the name of a small oval fruit of a Chinese gooseberry?"
"What word did Lewis Carroll coin in 1871 by blending the words chuckle and snort?"
We haven't been able to leave this one alone, to the point of hauling the boxes of Question Cards about with us in the car on road trips. It's (zounds) terrific.
Bethump'd With Words is recommended for 2 to 8 players, teenagers to adults; reasonably language-savvy younger kids, however, should be able not only to hold their own, but to have a fine time doing it. (A junior version of the game will be available in early 1997.) For further information, to order, or to locate a distributor in your area, contact Mamopalire, R.R. 1, Box 122-3, Warren, VT 05674; (802) 496-4095; FAX (802) 496-4096.
How Math Works
How Math Works by Carol Vorderman (Reader's Digest; 1996), in close to 200 oversized pages, demonstrates - through creative text and many wonderful color photographs - "100 ways parents and kids can share the wonders of mathematics." The book covers a vast number of topics mathematical, roughly grouped into six categories: "Numbers," "Proportions," "Algebra," "Statistics," "Measurement," "Shape," and "Thinking." Under each is included some reader-friendly explanatory information, assorted short illustrated biographies of famous mathematicians, and - the meat of the book - a wide range of irresistable hands-on projects, targeted at young mathematicians aged 8 to 14. Users, for example, are shown how to make and manipulate a set of "Napier's bones" - numbered rods used in lieu of the calculator in the early 1600's, how to build a single and a double pulley and measure their relative mechanical advantages, how to build a thermometer, and how to play a rousing game of negative-number hopscotch. Kids are encouraged to paint a color wheel or build a working model computer (cardboard), to graph the temperature changes in a cup of coffee, tell time with a candle clock, measure the heights of trees with a homemade astrolabe, play a game of pentominoes, and make an Archimedean spiral. And much more. All projects use readily available everyday materials - if you're already supplied with measuring cups, modeling clay, rulers, and posterboard, you're more than halfway there.
How Math Works is available through bookstores.
XIT
Pronounced "EXIT," this is a simple, clever card game for small fry, designed to teach early number skills. The game consists of a pack of 42 playing cards, each marked with a numeral from 1 to 6 (in blue) and a corresponding number of (red) colored dots. Each XIT player is initially dealt a hand of six cards. On each turn, players roll three dice - one red, one blue, and one green - and discard those cards in their hands that match the numbers on the dice. They then draw one card from the pack. The play continues until one person - the winner - manages to get rid of all his/her cards.
XIT is a quick and enjoyable means of teaching beginning counting and matching skills; it also holds the attention of older children. Appropriate for kids aged 4 and up.
The game is made by Millenium 2 Games, Ltd., of London, England; in the United States, it costs approximately $9.00, and is available from the Old Game Store, Rte. 11/30, P.O. Box 1756, Manchester Center, VT 05255-1756; (800) 818-GAME.
Catchpenny
This board game - "The Game of 18th-Century Mon-o-polies" - is the latest from Chatham Hill Games, and it's a gem. As players circle the playing board, they pass through the streets and alleyways of 18th-century London, landing on Monopoly-style squares, each of which represents a street pedlar hawking his or her wares: Plumb Cakes, Roasted Apples, Sheep's Heads, Writing Pens, Kentish Cherries, New Laid Eggs, Rabbets O! The first player to land on a square can "take control" of that pedlar, charging subsequent players for the wares the pedlar sells. (Gain control of a whole street of pedlars and the price of their wares doubles.) Payments are made and accepted in replicas of 18th-century coins: copper pennies, silver sixpences, shillings, and crowns.
Catchpenny players contend with the many ups and downs of life in old London: they struggle to avoid incarceration in Newgate Prison or Bedlam Hospital, participate hopefully in the State Lottery, try to elude the Navy's press gangs and the town Bailiff, and match wits with the scoundrelly Mountebank. First player to control 21 of the board's 40 pedlars or to accumulate a guinea - one pound and one shilling - in cold cardboard cash wins the game and becomes the new "Catchpenny:" "King of the Beggars, Vagabonds, and Street Pedlars, Lord of the London Streets." It's not winning, though, that's the most fun - that, after all, means that the game is over.
The game includes an eight-page London Journal that provides historical background, including both the"compleat Rules for the play of Catchpenny," and "the latest news of life and customs on the busy streets of London." To order, or to obtain a complete catalog of available games, contact Chatham Hill Games, P.O. Box 253, Chatham, NY 12037; (518) 392-5022; FAX (518) 392-3121.
Thumbprints
The homeschooling Burton family has started a bimonthly magazine - Thumbprints - "designed with one purpose in mind: to provide students with an opportunity to see their writing efforts published attractively." The premier issue - October 1996 - was primarily written by very young authors, but the editors state that submissions of all kinds - short stories, poems, humorous pieces, non-fiction essays, and song lyrics - from kids of all ages are welcomed. There are only four simple guidelines for submissions: make it legible; keep it under 200 words; let the publisher know whether or not you want your submission edited (are you sure about that spelling?); and include a title and the author's name.
An annual subscription (6 issues) costs $12; potential subscribers and hopeful contributors should contact Thumbprints, 2633 Partridge Trail, Duluth, GA 30155.
Duo
Mensa has dubbed this The best mind games of 1996, which goes to show that you can still get a lot in one small inexpensive package. Duo is a pack of 80 attractive cards, each bearing combinations of three different elements: color (orange, blue, purple, or green), number (1, 2, 3, or 4), and symbol (square, triangle, circle, or X). Each player initially is dealt a hand of seven cards; the remainder of the pack is placed face down, with two cards turned face up, one on each side of the pack. Each player, in turn, tries to play the cards from his/her hand onto the face-up cards, laying down a card that matches at least two out of the three displayed elements. Players can match, for example, color and number - say, a purple three on a purple three - or color and symbol, or number and symbol. First player to unload his/her cards wins.
Duo reinforces a battery of pattern-forming mathematical skills; it's also tremendous fun. Recommended for persons aged 7 to adult, from U.S. Games Systems, Inc., 179 Ludlow Street, Stamford, CT 06902; (203) 353-8400.
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