Growing up in the country, I was so fascinated by birds in nature. One of my absolute favourite finds was an old abandoned bird nest in our garden. I tried to place the nest in a tree, hoping a bird would choose my hidden nest for its home. The birds in our garden sang their beautiful songs to me but never chose the nest I found for a home.

Now that I have my children, I try to recreate some of the beautiful memories I had as a child for my little ones. I created a pond invitation to play that had a bird’s nest. My girls were super excited about it, so I put together a bird and their nest tray for them because, at the time, we were also reviewing the letter ‘Nn’. Here it is!

Before presenting the girls with the tray
we started our investigation by reading:

Ed’s Egg by David Bedford is A book about a little chicken that does not want to come out of its egg.

The Perfect Nest by Catherine Friend is about a cat that built a perfect nest because he wanted eggs. A chicken, a duck and a goose came along and laid their eggs.
While reading, we discussed the materials that birds use to create their nests, like leaves, twigs, and grass.

The Materials you will need to recreate this invitation to play:

Most of the materials used to put this sensory tray together were from Dollarama. During spring, there are so many materials in Dollarama to choose from when creating sensory invitations for littles.

• Bird seeds
• Containers for pouring 
• Wooden slices
• Wooden letters
• Wooden spoons
• Plastic eggs
• Wooden tongs
• Painters tape
• Decorative Birds
• Decorative bird nests
• Egg cartons 

How to put this simple and fun educational tray together:

Step 1: Pour your bird seeds onto the tray and hide the letters of the alphabet or the letters in your children’s names in the bird seeds.

Step 2: Place containers for pouring and scooping onto the tray.

Step 3: Use your painter’s tape to label the eggs with your children’s names. You can also label the eggs with words and numbers if you want your littles working on multiple skills at a time.

Step 4: Label the egg Cartons with names or symbols for the skill you want to work on with your little ones.

Putting this tray together is pretty straightforward. I placed anything I could find to enhance the girls learning about birds and their nests and other skills I wanted to work on.

This simple, fun tray lends itself to learning in many ways. Below I will share some Skills we were able to work on.

Name recognition with all the labelled eggs and trays. My girls worked to collect all the eggs that had their names on them, placing them into their egg cartons.

We discussed where birds live and what is inside the eggs in the birds’ nests.

We discussed what birds eat with all the bird seeds they were playing in. The girls scooped and poured seeds into containers for the birds in their nests. One twin mentioned that birds also eat worms. If I do this invitation again, I will definitely cut some pipe cleaners for pretend worms.

We reviewed the letter ‘Nn’.The letters that are in their names were also placed in the bird seeds, which gave the girls an opportunity to identify and review the letters and their corresponding sounds.

The girls counted and identified amounts for numbers from 1-5.

They used their fine motor skills as they used the tongs to collect letters, small wooden birds, leaves and feathers that were in the bird seeds.

We had so much messy fun with this invitation to play and will definitely find ways to extend this invitation in the future! We will also take our play outside next time!

If you try this invitation to play, please Send us pictures of your little ones doing this activity, so we can share them in this article!😊

We do hope you find this simple sensory invitation useful. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us by sending us a message or visiting us @learning.stepbystep on Instagram, Learning Step By Step on Facebook and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for educational resources that will help you and your littles on their learning journey as they continue to Learn Step By Step!

Thank you for being here!

Kimberlee and the Learning Step By Step Team.