At our preschool, we have a collection of fake birds. (That’s an Amazon affiliate link to something similar.) In the spring, I hide them all over the classroom (up high where kids can’t reach them, since they’re not really sturdy enough for kids to handle a lot.) Make sure they are visible from kid’s height, if they look in the right places.

Then I set out binoculars (real ones, or binoculars made with toilet paper tubes). And a birding guide I made. (To make it, I just took a picture of all the birds before I hid them. Then I cropped out all the birds, and put it together into the file below.) You want to use photos of the actual birds you hide so it’s easy for the kids to match them.

It takes about 15 minutes to set up (hide them all) and then I leave it out for a few weeks. I count how many birds I hide so I make sure to put them all away when I’m done. One year when I hid them, I found one I’d hid the previous year! (It was in plain sight if you looked but somehow I’d looked past it for a year.)