A Little Penguin Fun

During our polar animal unit, we especially focused on penguins.

Penguins on Puffy Snow Art

The kids loved using puffy snow paint so much, that we brought it back out again to create some penguin pictures.

For this project, I modeled drawing a penguin with basic shapes and it was really fun to see how the students applied that to their own work.

Don't Feed the Penguin Game

I was inspired by this game to make this number recognition game. 

I made the little fish out of orange pipe cleaner, and added the tweezers for an extra fine motor challenge.

Shape Penguins Craft

I cut out a bunch of different kinds of shapes, and the students were free to use whichever ones they wanted to create their penguin.

Journal Writing

In the end, it was fun to see what everyone had learned about penguins as they wrote in their journals. One boy told me he didn't know that penguins had tails, one drew about a penguin sitting on an egg to keep it warm, one told me a story about a penguin diving into the water. The one above made sure to use yellow because he wanted to make an emperor penguin.

Exploring Polar Animals

Last year I did a whole unit on polar bears because one of my students just loved them. It was a really fun way to talk about the snow, cold, and animal adaptations. This year I decided to expand that topic to look at polar animals in general. (We did end up focusing a lot on penguins, however.)

Polar Animals Sensory Bin

I used the same snow dough recipe that I tried last year for the base in this bin.

 Gorilla loved helping me make the dough. :)

I added this set of polar animals, and the kids added some other containers throughout their play. In the beginning we had all the animals in the bin together, although later we talked more about which animals lived at the North Pole and which lived at the South Pole. 

Some students became engaged in dramatic type play with the animals, while others just enjoyed the sensory experience of the snow. One student loved picking up a handful and rubbing it in between his hands to make it look like it was snowing. 

North Pole/South Pole Racing Game

I set up this game and gave the kids some basic ideas for how to play, but it's always fun to see how kids create and change games to meet their own interests. 

Polar Animal Sticker Sorting

I found some polar animal stickers that we used to sort based on where they live. 

The kids were pretty familiar with some of the animal stickers, but others were not as common, so it was a fun way to talk about different kinds of animals and think about where they live. 

Some kids added their own animal drawings to the poles as well.

Polar Animal Habitat Sorting

We also used the play animals to sort based on their main habitat: land or water. Many of these animals are interesting because they spend time in each. For this activity, I filled the water table with water and snow.

Later we added some icebergs.

This activity brought up some great questions and observations about polar animals and ice, like:

The water is soooo cold! How do they stay warm? 

Why is the ice melting so fast in the water? 

Student questions are the best springboard for future lessons and learning, so we will be doing some more exploring with the cold and ice this week!

Hibernation Celebration

 Last week was all about bears and hibernating. In addition to making our bear caves, we talked about different animals that hibernate using the book Time to Sleep and a few other non-fiction books that I have.

This is a great book for practicing the comprehension skill of retelling, so we put the animal words in order of their place in the book.

We also used these words for some beginning sounds practice and in our predictable reading chart.

The kids wore their pajamas one day and we also made some simple bear hats.

One of our favorite activities was pretending to hibernate and sleep like bears.

This bear cave fort was a favorite last year, so I built one again this year. I sang the song below while the kids went to "sleep" in the cave and then woke them up by saying "It's spring! It's spring!"

(Tune: Are You Sleeping?)

Bear is sleeping, bear is sleeping

In the cave, in the cave

Wonder when he'll wake up, wonder when he'll wake up

In the spring, in the spring

It was also fun to pretend to sleep like other animals that hibernate- curling up like snails, tucking in shells like turtles, or hanging upside-down like bats. 

Finally, we wrote in our journals about bears. It's been a fun topic to study.

Puffy Snow Art

We made this snow "paint" after reading Red Sled, a favorite winter book.

It's really easy to make: just mix together shaving cream and glue. The glue helps it to stay puffy after it dries.

This art process takes some experimenting to make the snow look more or less puffy.

One student requested a person to go along with their red sled.

After I cut one out, they all wanted one.

The kids love to walk by this display and touch and smell their artwork, making it a sensory experience even after the process is finished.

Sleeping Bears

This week we made bear caves out of boxes.

My favorite part of this activity was listening to the fun comments the kids made as they painted:

"I'm doing snow on top."

"Brown can be sticks."

"Sometimes the wind blows snow inside."

"Bears can decorate with flowers or leaves."

"There's a little bit of moss growing on my cave."

The caves were the perfect size for these teddy bears. 

We tucked them in for a long winter's nap.

The bears need to sleep through the winter until it's spring again, so we are going to count down the weeks until it is time to wake them up.

Our classroom might not be the most quiet place for them to sleep, but it will definitely be warm!

(Thanks to Teach Preschool for the inspiration behind this idea!!)

Back from Winter Break!

The preschool took a long break over Thanksgiving and Christmas this year so that we could welcome this little ladybug into our family. It has been such a special time for us!

This week we started up class again after the break, and it has been so fun to add teaching back into my week. I really just love planning lessons, being in the classroom, and interacting with the kids. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to run my own program so that I can balance this passion with my family life as well. 

Anyway- we started off the New Year by exploring winter and snow. Thanks to some great storms over the holidays, we still have a lot of it around! 

Snowflake Art

One favorite activity was using pipettes to squeeze colored water onto the coffee filter snowflakes we made earlier.

This was a great process for using fine motor skills, mixing colors, and just exploring with water.

We discovered that when the snowflakes dried, the color mostly just stayed around the edges. One student was a little disappointed that his snowflake didn't turn out to be all blue like he had colored it. In the future I might experiment with some different mediums to see what saturates the filter with color more effectively. 

Painting Snow Sensory Bin

This activity is so easy to set up, and always a hit with the kids. Just watercolors and snow!

Hot Chocolate Counting

We are working on counting through the teen numbers this month, and I love how these counting mats visually reinforce one-to-one correspondence and the break-down of these numbers into tens and ones. I pulled out some tweezers to add some fine motor challenge to this activity as well.

 Sometimes I've noticed that kids aren't always interested in counting activities like these at first. So often I will initially just set them out for the kids to freely explore, but then I will initiate some sort of simple game that applies the skills. Things like racing a friend or using dice to decide how many to put on at a time can really increase their level of engagement.

When I set up this center, I just scattered the counting mats around and didn't pay attention to number order. But during clean up time, I noticed one student carefully counting and rearranging the cups so they were in the correct order! I love watching kids apply their knowledge independently and interacting with materials in ways that I had not thought of before. :)