Pinecone birdfeeders

I'm sure these are pretty self explanatory and have been being done (is that how you say that?) for years. But, nonetheless, I thought it was a great activity to do for our winter unit. We just got done talking about animals in winter last week, so we talked more about how many birds fly or migrate to warmer climates to survive the winter. But there are still many birds that stay where it is cold and eat what they need to survive. Sometimes snow can get very deep and it's hard for them to find food, so that is why these niftly little bird feeders come in handy!!

I let my kids go at this in the messy table, because after all.....it IS a mess! But they were so excited to "feed the birdies"!! Let each child have a popsicle stick and they can plop as much peanut butter as possible onto their pinecone.

As soon as it is covered with peanut butter (and believe me, this takes these little ones a little bit of time), they get to roll it in wild bird seed. I just got crushed sunflower seeds for birds from Walmart. I'm sorry about the above picture, it's kind of blurry.

Then I tie a string onto them so they can be hung from a tree for the birds to easily get at. For easy take home, I just put them in plastic ziplocks and put their names on them. Most of the kids made about 3 or 4 of these.....what a blast!!