Exploring a Polar Bear's Habitat

This week we have been using our sensory bin as a polar bear habitat. I first set it up like this, using some leftover styrofoam from a package.

This looked really awesome, but the styrofoam didn't turn out to be the best play material to work with. While I had envisioned maybe building with the styrofoam blocks, the play evolved into simply demolishing the styrofoam, which was mostly just messy and noisy. Live and learn! :)

So for the next day, I made this recipe for "snow dough" and we tried that in the bin instead. It was still messy, but overall a more pleasant sensory experience for everyone.

Today we explored this question:

How do polar bears stay warm in their arctic habitat?

First we tried holding some ice in our hands to feel how cold it is. Most of the students could only hold it for 5-10 seconds before their hand was too cold. So how do polar bears stay warm in the ice and snow? A few students guessed that the polar bear's fur keeps them warm.

So we tried holding ice with gloves, pretending like we had polar bear fur on our hands. Everyone agreed it was easy to hold the ice with gloves, and their hands stayed warm. But what about when polar bears swim in the ice cold water? Is their fur enough to keep them warm?

Next we tried dipping our hands in the ice water with the gloves on. At first, the gloves seemed to keep their hands warm, but eventually the water seeped though and it got pretty cold.

It was hard to think of ways that polar bears can stay warm in the water, even when their fur is wet. So I pulled out another tool that I had prepared for us to explore with- a bag full of fat. (Really, it was two ziploc bags filled with shortening, sealed shut, and then placed inside another ziploc bag.)

Everyone took a turn putting one hand inside the shortening bag and one hand in the water without any covering.

The hand in the bag stayed warm!

This exploration was a great way to experience and talk about how polar bears have special fur, and a layer of fat underneath that fur that helps them to thrive in their icy habitat. I left the ice bucket out in the sensory bin so the students could continue to explore throughout center time.

In the end, the favorite activity was taking the polar bears for an icy swim.