Although a temporary interruption, it was a welcomed opportunity to pay attention to the natural world outside our window. As educators and learners, it is valuable to pay attention and follow the lead of our students as they pay close attention to the natural world. Watching and monitoring birds throughout the year can be a rich experience for students in the classroom. It provides many opportunities for inquiry and research. Observing and recording bird sightings is a way to keep track of all kinds of information including weather.
Students can look for patterns of birds visiting throughout the day as well as the seasons.
All of these questions are springboards to scientific inquiry. Students can design formats for collecting and recording information over time and then use this data to create hypotheses and new questions. A structured program for organizing this type of study in the classroom is Classroom FeederWatch, a program of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. Classrooms participate in scientific research by reporting sightings at their bird feeders throughout the school year. The goals of this program are for students to learn to identify birds, ask questions, design experiments, collect, analyze and display data, and publish conclusions.