Polar Pal Fun

January is a fun time in my classroom. It is special for me personally, because I get to bring in all of my Alaska memorabilia to share with my class. Although I was raised in Georgia, I was born in Alaska and my mom grew up there. I have collected trinkets and children's books from Alaska for as long as I can remember. Since we do live so far away, most of the items I share are things the children have never been exposed to.

We used these snowflake worksheets from the Mailbox magazine as math mats with our tangram pieces.

We decided to try to make a giant snowflake with the pieces on our own.

I made some puffy snow paint from shaving cream, glue and some iridescent powder for a little fun in our art center.

Of course, no winter or polar unit would be complete without a few snowflakes. We've been working hard on our cutting skills and cutting snowflakes is such a good way to practice. We actually worked on these a few weeks ago, but I was pleased to see some of the friends continue this in our art center independently. Check out the "ice crystals" on this snowflake!

Our Hot Cocoa Stand has been popular this week.

Taking orders

They even added some salmon to the stand in case customers needed a little snack!

Mmmmm...now that's some tasty hot cocoa!

We pulled out the polar animals for a little play, seriation and sorting.

We turned our "theme box" into an igloo.

And they built igloos with cardboard blocks. Every time it would get almost built and I'd grab the camera, it would crash before I could get a good picture.

We also set up an ice fishing center. I added magnetic letters for the friends to fish for. I have a learning game with foam fish that have letters imprinted on them, so the challenge was to match the magnetic letters to the letters on the foam fish.

We added some polar animals and styrofoam pieces to our sensory table for a little water play.

While learning about penguins, the kids were surprised to learn that some penguins are actually quite tall. I drew one on butcher paper and the children worked as a group to color it.

We then measured each child to see who was taller or shorter than the penguin.

We make these cute Eskimos by tracing the outline of our closed hands and cut them out. We added faces and parka hoods and stretched and pulled some cotton for fur.

We did a lot of literacy activities and had one experience that morphed into a day filled with teachable moments and unexpected/unplanned activities that took on a life of their own. Look for posts about these coming coon!