Below are ideas for extending this topic beyond the activity and exploration you just completed.

• Lesson Assessment
• Activity Extension: More ways to experiment with bird “beaks” and “food.”
• Read-Aloud Books: Online books that focus on ducks, a familiar bird with an interesting bill.
  
• Video Activity: Watch videos of birds eating and discuss why each bird has the beak it does.
  
• Thinking Activity: Explore the similarities between bird beaks and human tools.
  

There are several ways to extend this activity.

• Repeat the activity with additional "foods" in each test square. Rubber bands make good worms. Different pastas can simulate seed pods. Marbles and pennies present a challenge. Which beak works best for which food?
• Simulate situations that make food more difficult to get. Crumple aluminum foil to represent rough tree bark. Sprinkle it with beans and macaroni.
  
• Check out the “Choose Your Food” activity from AAAS Science Net Links, which includes instructions for adding a mathematical component to the activity. Students count how many food items each beak picks up in a given time. Graph the data to compare the performance of different beaks.
  

Epic! offers books online for teachers to use for free. Just click “Get Started” to register.

• Quack Like A Duck — a fun book that will have kids mooing, quacking, and hee-haw-ing. (for ages 0 to 4)

• Animals on the Farm: Ducks — A duck on the farm describes his life. (for ages 5 to 7)

• I Love You Just Enough — A girl raises a lost duckling, then lets it return to nature as a wild duck. (for ages 7 to 9)

Watch videos of different birds eating. After each video, talk about what the bird is eating and how it uses its beak.

• Hummingbird sips from a flower.
• Macaws eat nuts.
• Great blue heron catches fish.
• Robin finds a worm.

Do you think a hummingbird could crack a nut like a macaw? Do you think a macaw could catch a fish like a great blue heron?

A bird’s beak is like a tool that helps the bird eat. What kinds of tools would you use if you wanted to:

• Crack a nut open?
• Scoop cereal out of a bowl filled with cereal and milk?
• Sip soda from a tall glass?
• Catch a slippery fish?

Can you think of a bird beak that works like these tools?
If you’re stumped, advance to the next slide to see our ideas.

At Mystery Science, we use nutcrackers for cracking nuts. A parrot’s beak is short and strong, and it works like a nut cracker.

A spoon is good for scooping up soggy cereal. It works like a duck’s broad bill.

A straw helps you sip soda from the bottom of a tall glass, just like the hummingbird’s beak lets that bird sip the sweet juice called nectar from the bottom of a flower.

A fork can stab a slippery fish, just like the pointy beak of an egret.