Birds' nest

We've been spending a lot of time talking about the shift from winter to spring and all the things that are going to change over the next couple of months. Gretchen has really glommed onto the idea of birds' nests and baby birds so when this popped up on my RSS feed I knew it would be a hit. This project was easy but it was pretty messy; even I was covered in glue. It was good for a messy activity where we could talk about colors, textures (how the yarn felt before the glue, how the glue felt, how the two felt together), animals, and where she could really use her motor skills.


(idk why it looks like she has a black eye, but she doesn't!)

So, basically all you do is cut up strings of different lengths, lay them out and let your little one dump a bunch of white school glue on them. Squish the glue around so that all the yarn is pretty well saturated. To make the nest, just layer the yarn onto an upside-down container of some sort. We used a little ikea bowl.





I found that I did have to encourage her to pick up individual strings rather than just piling the whole clump of yarn on top of the bowl. I also had to help adjust the yarn just a little bit, because she pretty much wanted to just pile it all up on one side. I don't normally give her any direction one way or another beyond telling her what the project is and how to make it, but I wanted her to have an actual bird's nest at the end.


It did take a really long time to dry. Gretchen also wasn't too crazy about sticky fingers as the glue dried. I think you could modify this project for pipe cleaners pretty easily.

Although I've done similar activities in a class I taught years ago, this idea came from The Imagination Tree.