We are currently using Burgess Bird Book for Children for one of her school books. The book has a wonderfully informative story format that is easy to read to my daughter. They keep her attention well, so having her narrate from it is fairly easy. I was noticing though that she was doing more about the interaction of the characters or what they were doing, then picking out the descriptions or some of the other differences. I realized that perhaps if I wanted her to focus more on the bird, and perhaps learn the way to tell them apart I’d need to take a slightly different approach.
I should mention that Burgess Bird Book for Children is a public domain book, that does have illustrations, even if the version on Gutenberg does not have them included. I was able to find the public domain illustrations online as well, and have created/edited the book to include color illustrations and better ereader formatting (a functional Table of Contents). If you are interested you may download the epub or mobi freely. I did some editing on the images as well, mainly some white balancing or color adjustments to compensate for the graying that usually occurs in older books.
When I was locating the images I found out that the same person who had done the illustrations had a number of coloring pages of most of the birds. It occurred to me that having her color the birds as I described them would help her remember the appearance of the various birds. Foolishly I appear to have misplaced the link I had originally found to the drawings (for coloring) so I had to do another search for them. This time while I was looking for them I came across another wonderful site for all sorts of coloring pages. This site has thousands of different coloring pages from basic to detailed so if you’re looking for a way to tie things together try: Super Coloring. You can also “color” the picture online and save the image if you prefer.
Today we tried this here, and it worked as well as I hoped it would. It has the added benefit of that she was listening specifically for what the birds looked like so she could color them. I will admit though since she can be a bit of a perfectionist I also pulled up computer images (after reading the descriptions to her and having her get started on them) to assist in her coloring. I’ve determined that currently this is the way I plan to handle the rest of the book with her. I also know her well enough to know that asking her to draw me a bird (of any sort) would not work well here. She doesn’t feel comfortable with her drawing and I don’t feel confident in mine either so I can’t teach her this. I do need to find a way to teach her drawing, and I think she’d be better for it, but I haven’t found a good inexpensive way yet.