Penguins!

I love, love, love teaching about penguins. Usually, I spend about 2 weeks teaching about penguins, but somehow I found myself in a huge crunch for time this month so I squeezed it into a week. Here's what we did!

We read, "The Penguin Who Wanted to Be Different" which is a cute story about a little penguin who doesn't like that she looks the same as all of the other penguins and wishes that something was special about her. After we finished reading, we discussed the meaning of the word, special. Then we shared what makes each of us special, their responses were so sweet to hear. I loved it. This student wrote, "I'm special because... I can sing".

We also read about penguins feathers and how they are waxy, oily which makes the water run right off of them. So we used water, wax paper, and a straw to demonstrate how the water slides right off of their waxy feathers. The kids were absolutely fascinated by this experiment.

After reading about different kinds of penguins and various special characteristics of each one, we discovered that the tallest penguin is the Emperor standing at 4 feet tall. We of course had to take turns standing next to my 4 foot penguin and then we made a chart who was taller, shorter, or the same height.

Who doesn't love a good ol' waddle race?! This is one super competitive class! We learned that penguin daddies are the main caretakers of their baby penguin egg. So we did some waddle races! They had to get to the other side of the carpet without touching their "egg" aka ball and if it get loose, they had to go back to the start. It's not as easy as it may look lol I tried it!

We also discussed where penguins live and the cold temperatures that they usually like. This also tied into one of our vocabulary words this week which was, temperature and thermometer. So I brought in ice water and heated up water so that the kids could experiment with the thermometers watching the mercury go up and down depending on the temperature of the water. They also were fascinated by this and were convinced that it is magic red juice inside.