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!

Polar Pal Snacks

We've been learning about polar pals this week and have had some fun food/snack activities. You may remember last year's post about the penguin cookie snacks we made. The kids enjoyed them so much that one of my little friends surprised me and brought in the ingredients to make them a second time! I was so tickled that they enjoyed them so much that I wrote Oreo Cookie Penguins Again?!!. Obviously, when I planned the unit for this year, I HAD to include this activity since it was such a hit! Here is this year's version:

We also made some polar bear cookies I saw posted somewhere (and couldn't find to get directions). We winged it and had a lot of fun making these. The pictures I remember seeing of these were pretty perfect, but our little hands are not adept at perfectly frosting the cookies yet. In fact, some of these came out looking more like mice that polar bears. Regardless, they were as fun to make as they were yummy in our tummies!

One of my AWESOME parents sent in smoked salmon and crackers for us to try. We've talked a lot about salmon and read several stories about this interesting fish. I was surprised at how many of the kids enjoyed it and wanted a second and third sampling! One of my little guys said, "hmmm...I think it must be pretty good, cuz it smells like bacon!". Their little observations are so astute sometimes!

Marvelous Macaroni Penguins

Our Polar Pal unit is underway and we are having BIG fun! We've learned about all different kinds of penguins. Every year, we usually make the shoe print penguins I posted last year. Recently, I saw these cute Macaroni penguins made from triangles and thought I'd try something different. I tried to go back and find the post, but after hours of searching, I was lost. I finally started experimenting, and came up with this example for the children  to use.

We traced large triangles and cut them out.

We glued the smaller white triangle on top of the larger black triangle. Yellow construction paper was cut to make feet and the little feather spikes on the top of the penguin's head.

I think they came out pretty cute, and it was something a little different than what we've done previously. I thought the parents might enjoy these since I have several students that are siblings of last year's students, so it will be something new for them to see. Because this was a teacher directed activity, we won't put these into student portfolios, but I got some great anecdotal notes on tracing, cutting and the students' narratives about their penguins.