Bird Beak Buffet

For science we've been studying animal adaptations; how animals adapt to their environment, basically.

Today we did Bird Beak Buffet, an activity that allowed the students an opportunity to become one with the bird, sort of. We had four different types of birds that for the most part live near water: an egret, a spoonbill, a gull and a heron. All of these bird's beaks are a bit different.

The students had a 15 second time limit to "eat" as much of a certain type of food. We had marbles that represented squid, raisins for crab, uncooked rice for shrimp, and elbow macaroni for worms.

The students would record how much of each food they were able to get using the beak models of the birds. The heron was two toothpicks, the egret was tweezers, the gull used clothespin, and the spoonbill, well we used 2 plastics spoons! Go figure.