We got off to a slow start this morning because I became a grandma for the first time on Tuesday evening. So ... I had some pictures to share and the students and mom wanted to see the pictures. We lost about 20 minutes of time while we shared pictures and information.
I simply love teaching children. My students were perfectly happy as we started the morning doing puzzles and turning in their homework.
As soon as I told them that we would be talking about penguins, they both needed a sweatshirt on because they were cold.
They really get into the topic of Penguins as we learned "The Penguin Song", found at http://www.dltk-teach.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-teach.com/rhymes/penguin/penguinsong_sheetmusic.gif. We also started working on a new concept, labeling, so
I had drawn a penguin on the white board along with a list of the things we needed to identify. The students are very good at copying letters so I am trying to give them more purposeful writing. They took turns "reading" a word on the list and deciding what part of the penguin it would identify.
As we finished labeling the penguin we played Penguin Pile-up by Ravensburger. It is a great game of strategy that requires fine motor control to place the penguins on the iceberg without making any of the other penguins fall off.
When it was time for snack, we waddled like a penguin to the bathroom to wash our hands. It was very difficult to walk like a penguin up the stairs, so we changed back into people and climbed the stairs.
Snack was a a beautiful penguin wonderland. We made a penguin from part of a cheese stick for the body, a grape cut in half for the flippers, a grape for the head, and a bit of carrot for his beak. Our penguin had lots of gold fish to eat and a blue jello cup for swimming. As it turns out the penguin just watched as the gold fish tried to swim in the jello cup.
The Arctic chill continued so we stayed inside and tried to better understand the life of a penguin. We tied pillows to the students' stomachs and then used a small ball to represent a penguin egg. The egg was placed on the penguin's feet and the pillow stomach was pushed down to keep the egg warm. With the pillow it made it easier to understand why penguins waddle and not walk like we do. There is no place for them to bend knees if they had them.
Our eggs hatched into stuffed animals that we kept warm under our pillow (blubber). We tried to slide on the floor on our stomachs like penguins. It didn't work very well on the carpet so they crawled as best they could around the pillow. Next time I will suggest that we slide on the kitchen tile to see if the we could slide better without the friction of the carpet. Besides the tile surface would be more closely resemble the surface of ice.
We did a quick science experiment, we rubbed some shortening on the back of one hand to see how a penguin's waterproof feathers help to keep the freezing cold water away from their bodies. We put both of our hands in water and took them out. The water on the hand rubbed with shortening the water slid right off. Whereas, the water on the other hand the water stayed on the surface for a while until we shook it off.
We recorded our discovery in our Science journals. We already knew that blubber and huddling together would keep the penguins warm. We added all three items to our penguin fact sheet.
To finish off the day we worked on our numbers. We filled in the missing number on our penguin number cards. Penguin number cards from sommerpride.blogspot.com.
Homework was an ABC dot-to-dot penguin,from http://www.coloring.ws/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.coloring.ws/animals/penguins/15.gif; an Itsy Bitsy Penguin Book, from www.kidzone.ws; and Parts of a Penguin worksheet I created.
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