BIRDS
by TheTeachersDesk.info
Copyright: © 2008
$3.00 E-Book
77 Pages
A recent fascination with my own backyard birds has led to a fun summer hobby. I now have six bird feeders in my yard, and have purchased 3 various books all about birds. I even made a trip to the zoo recently well, just for the birds. So, I immediately began searching Lulu for good bird books. Although I found several-mostly coffee table photo type books-one of the best is called BIRDS, and it’s put out by a publisher calling itself TheTeachersDesk.info.
Let me say right now that I really only found two negative things about this book. The first is the book cover. The book is targeted towards teachers of K through 6, but the book lacks all appeal judging it by the boring two color sky and water photo with not a bird in sight. All of my bird books have a bright colored bird on the cover, one has four birds and a feeder. If the title of this book was not BIRDS, then I’d probably mistaken it for one of those Christian pamphlets that gets left on my car from time to time.
Second, judging by the content I think some of it is either passed the 6th grade, or too broad of a spectrum for information taught in a basic K through 6 curriculum. Should a sixth grader even be taught from the same book as a 5 year old? The book contains a nice coloring book style picture of a bird which is a diagram pointing to the various body parts of a bird. This is perfect for K through 3rd grade I’d imagine.
It’s followed by a very simple “Bird Classification” table that ends with the phrase, “Not all flying animals are birds; and not all birds can fly.” I could see this as a poster on a 3rd or 4th grade Science class wall (maybe). The classification information continues with an outline of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. I vaguely recall covering this in 5th and 6th grade. Next is a list of bird orders like Anseriformes and Coraciiformes. I don’t remember ever having to learn scientific names of animals until my Freshman year of college, but I could be wrong.
So those two things being said, let’s talk about all of the positive aspects of this teaching tool. It’s filled with both black and white and colored photos that are very nice and appealing. It also has quizzes and reviews at the end of each section, labeled “elementary” and “upper elementary.” There’s even a true and false type quiz using bright yellow smiley and frowny faces.
The information provided in each section is very compact and precise, and simple to comprehend which I think is important for kids who might have shorter attention spans. My personal favorite part was the “beaks” section which compares different bird beaks and their primary use to household kitchen tools and various items such as nutcrackers, scoops, nets, and spears. If a teacher gathered these items for show they’d have a great visual lesson for kids!
There are also suggested projects divided by lower and upper grades such as “build a bird” and various reading assignments. There are web links to listen to bird calls and songs. There’s even a section with some quick drawing lessons from a fun cartoon bird made from two circles to a more complex duck with lots of detail. For teachers who prefer worksheets, there’s coloring pages, word searches, connect the dots, and mazes. It wraps up with two pages of bird jokes (all kid friendly) and an answer key for the quizzes.
One slight problem near the end is the “Bird Links” section where the links are hidden behind the titles of the sections. I was reading this in PDF from my Lulu account so I could not click on the words and get them to link to the sites. There are other websites mentioned throughout the book which give the actual dot com address and are much more user friendly. But I’d also like to note that at the bottom of a few sections, there is an email address you can write to to receive a free classroom poster that corresponds to that section.
So, for a recent bird fan, I found this book to be informative and entertaining, and worth much more than the three dollar price! For teachers wanting to spend a few weeks in the classroom getting students to learn all about birds, this teaching tool pack is a must!
