Rockin' Robin Footprints

On this beautiful morning we were reading a children's collection of spring poems before we went for a walk. A few of the poems were about robins which prompted Big Brother to look through the floorboards of the deck at an old robin's nest.

More to my surprise than his, there was an egg in the nest! He was excited about his discovery and quickly spotted the mother robin in the yard nervously watching us. Big Brother connected the nest discovery to Jan Brett's book The Easter Egg in which a bunny keeps the robin's egg warm. He was worried the mother was not sitting on her nest. (We gave the area space during the day so the Mommy would come back.) Although impressed with his literature connection, my connection to the discovery was remembering a cute foot print project I'd seen on Pinterest a while back. We decided to delay our walk for a little bit so we could try the painting project. I knew we also had some shredded gift basket paper saved from Christmas which would make a perfect nest.

For this project we used red and green poster paint, white glue, white and blue card stock, crayons, and our recycled basket filler. 

We mixed red and green paint in order to make brown. Following the mixing we painted Big Brother's foot brown and printed it onto paper. We repeated this step several times.

Big Brother thought it would be fun to paint Little Brother's foot, so we tried that too and added his print to the papers. 

On one set of footprints I showed Big Brother how to paint red half circles next to the prints so they looked like red bellies. He repeated this on one of the other sheets of paper.  

We then talked about what else a robin had which we would need to include in our picture. It was a great opportunity to talk about how birds were different than people. In the end we decided to include beaks, legs, and eyes. I worked on my model and he copied on his. He did ask me to draw the beaks so he could color them in. 

Now it was time to make the nests using card stock ovals, the shredded material, and blue egg shaped cut outs. We glued these to our foot print papers. 

In the end, we had very cute sets of robins. Each had a baby and an egg in the nest and a "Mommy" robin. Although inspired by Pinterest, which often looks perfect, I love how Big Brother's picture is clearly created by a kid. (My model is on the left, his is on the right. Notice the extra legs on his.)

And One More Cute Kid Connection:

Throughout the rest of the day Big Brother continued to look for robins and keep an eye on the nest. While painting I had downloaded "Rockin' Robin" by Bobby Day and we played it multiple times. (For those of you who don't know the song, the word "tweet"is repeated several times in the chorus.) Just before dinner we were listening to Pandora when an advertisement came on which mentioned "tweeting" in reference to Twitter, the social network site. Big Brother thought this was one more great connection and shouted out, "Mommy, they said tweet just like the robins!"