Penguins!

Penguins are such interesting birds that it makes them so much fun to teach. The kids love learning about penguins! Here are some things we did for my penguin unit the past 2 weeks. We started week 1 with fictional penguin stories and projects and then week 2 was more focused on non-fictional books and activities.

Using GLAD strategies, I started with each day by adding new info to our penguin poster. Some of the kids still haven't caught on that I trace it first lol so they think I am just an amazingly fast drawer and writer lol


Each day we focused on a specific topic about penguins and then we'd review what we learned using our observation posters. The main topics I choose to focus on were:
Penguins:

• diet
• predators
• habitat
• life cycle 
• body parts
• extra fun facts

When we learned about the 17 different kinds of penguins specifically the shortest (Fairy) and the tallest (Emperor) we measured out the height of an Emperor and then took turns comparing ourselves to see who in our class should be crowned the Fairy and the Emperor. The kids loved this! I think next year I will buy little crowns for the "winners".


We also did "waddle races" to pretend we were penguin mommy and daddy caring for our eggs by keeping a ball between our ankles and racing to the other side of the carpet without touching it and without letting it touch the carpet or dropping. It was all kinds of chaotic fun lol so I only got videos, no pictures.

We also huddled together to learn about how penguins survive in their super cold temperatures.
We took turns switching from the inside to the outside of the huddle just like penguins do.


We read a ton of TACKY the Penguin books and The Penguin Who Wanted to Be Different and then made our own penguin and wrote on the belly something that we can do really well and that makes us special.