It's All About the Penguins & Snowmen!

I find that kids REALLY like learning about penguins and it's a fun topic to teach as well! I started my penguin unit by gathering fiction and non-fiction penguin books. We read lots of Tacky the Penguin books and then we did this project to go along with, "The Penguin Who Wanted to Be Different". I seriously loved reading why every student thinks they are special and different. 

After reading tons of fiction books, we moved onto tackling non-fiction. 

Before reading we created a schema poster to take notes of anything we ready think we know about penguins and any questions we ready have about penguins and hope to learn. I wrote things we know in purple, things we want to know in blue, and then throughout the week as we answer the questions we add the answers in red. 

We of course needed to play the waddle race! The kids looooved this activity! I taped down a start and finish line and had to kids go at a time. The directions were they couldn't touch the "egg" unless it fell down (then they could fix it and start over). I wanted to give each winner some goldfish, since penguins eat fish! But I forgot to buy some so the winners got marshmallows. However, the runners up all did awesome as well soooo marshmallows for everyone!!

Everyday we read at least 2 pages about penguins in one of our non-fiction books. After we read we take some time to reflect and practice comprehension by then adding new facts to our poster. 

And then we also wanted to see if we were taller than, shorter than, or the same height as the tallest 4 foot emperor penguin. 

And we also talked about the parts of a penguin by labeling new parts as we learned about them. The kids were fascinated about webbed feet! 

And all of that was only week one! We will continue to learn all about Penguims this week as well! I'll add updates later! :) 

****************

I love winter time so much for a million reasons. But one reason is because I love snowman activities! Here are some fun projects we created this week mixed in with penguins. We created a winter wonderland by fingerprinting a snowman, tear art pine tree, writing a sentence about our picture, and then marble painting some Snow. 

We also took a look at real snow globes and wondered what it would be like if we lived inside one! Perfect opportunity for some creative writing. 

We spelled our name to make snowmen to see whose name is the longest. 

And then we drew snowballs for each snowman and added them altogether to make our addition snowmen sentences.