Penguins

What a long week! We had so much going on with finishing Dibels and getting report cards done. Ms. Schiffer was out all week (congrats to her son on his graduation!). We sure did miss her. I apologize for the poor quality of some of the pictures. I was snapping quickly when I got a chance. I am so upset that I did not take any photos of the books we worked on in writing all week. They turned out so good! I think I was just as excited as they were to take them home and share with their families. The kids have really loved working with nonfiction stories this week. We created this chart to show all of the text features found in nonfiction books.

I loved hearing them say "look this one has a table of contents" or "I found a glossary". I felt like a proud mama. :-) I put together some browsing boxes full of a variety of nonfiction books for the kids to explore as they came in to the class in the morning or if they finished work early. They had given me a list of topics they were interested in learning more about and I checked out as many books from the library as I could.

Our unit is on Polar Animals. We started by learning about the Poles (North and South). We were so surprised to learn that a polar bear and penguin would probably never meet unless at the zoo. We could not believe that it gets so cold at the South Pole that metal could snap! We made a connection to our learning about animals in winter last week. We talked about how some animals adapt to colder weather last week. That is just what polar animals do. They have adapted to live in extreme cold. Some migrate as well.

This week we focused mainly on penguins. We created a schema chart to record what we already knew about penguins and to keep up with what we have learned. We read lots of NF on penguins and we practiced picking out key details to add to our chart as new learning or to attach to our prior knowledge (schema). In writing, we made our own NF books about penguins-complete with a table of contents. Many of the activities I used for penguins came from a unit from Deanna Jump. Love all of her stuff! Wish I had pictures to share because the kids really did an amazing job! I do have a photo of our tree map that we created to help us write our sentences. We had lots of questions about penguins and how they stay warm. We used the scientific method to find answers to those questions. First, we read in one of our books that it gets so warm in the middle of a penguin huddle, they have to move to the back to cool off. We couldn't believe that they could get hot in 100 below 0 weather. We made some predictions (hyposthesis) about how it happens and then decided to try a huddle of our own outside.

Here's our little penguins all huddled together. We concluded that being huddled closely together helps to block the wind. If we stood close enough together we could trap the warm air and keep the cool air out. Pretty amazing! We also wondered how having oily feathers could help keep them warm. We had a few interesting ideas (acted like a coat) so we decided to give that one a try. We coated our hand with petroleum jelly and placed it in ice cold water. We observed that the water would bubble up on our hand and roll off. Our hand felt dry. We determined that the oil helps keep their feathers dry. We all know that we feel colder when we are wet. So by staying dry the penguins can stay warm.

In math, we started our unit on measurment. We focused on height this week. Our penguin friends helped us out. We really had to work hard at using the words "taller" and "shorter" (not just saying "bigger" and "smaller"). We compared our height to that of an Emperor penguin. First, we predicted whether we would be taller, shorter, or the same height. Then, we compared and graphed.

We traced our foot to make a penguin. We took our penguins around the room and compared his height to other objects. We did take a break from NF to read a fiction story about Tacky the penguin. We LOVED him! We talked about how this story was different from all of the others we had been reading. We created a character map for Tacky. I used the data projector/doc camera to show the kids how to draw Tacky. We came up with a list of adjectives to describe him. We had to use examples from the story to support our thinking. Here are some of our creations.

On Friday, we made a special penguin snack. We had to read and follow the recipe to make our own. It was not as easy as we thought to break the Oreos. They were cute and yummy in the end though!

We also took a virtual field trip to 2 aquariums across the country to observe penguins. You can check them out at home! Just click on the links below to visit the websites!