I was inspired by Joyful Learner's penguin activities. ( I love her blog. Her daughter is a year older than Bear, so a lot of her activities are being starred for later!)
We focused on learning the names of the Chinstrap, Emperor, and Rockhopper penguin.
Bear made penguin tracks.
She matched penguins to penguin cards (from Jojoebi at A Bit of This A Bit of That ). I only gave her the cards for which she had penguins, but some of them were very challenging and I helped her. She was able to do the three focus penguin on her own though :)
I froze different containers of water in the freezer and we used these as icebergs to balance our penguins. Bear learned how different sized and shaped icebergs are better for standing on:)
We also measured up the wall how tall Bear was and then compared that height to the height of the three focus penguins. I was impressed with how big an Emperor penguin really is. An Adelie penguin is short and slim. Taller than J-jo - the baby - , but a lot less heavy! Hehe.
Then we balanced an egg (toy) on our feet like the penguins do and pretended to hatch it, playing with the chick from the animal toob.
We read a ton of penguin books. Did you know an Adelie penguin can jump four times its height? And that the male Emperor has to go three months without food until the mother comes back with food for the chick? You can see our two favorite fiction ones here.
Hello there from sunny island of Singapore! Im also a homeschooling mama and your blog has been a constant source of homeschooling ideas for me. My son is 31months old, there about the same age as your kid? By the way, i would love to link your blog to mine. May i? :)
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of freezing different containers, what a fun way to play.
ReplyDeleteI am collecting polar bear/penguin activities to do with my daughter later in the year. The SeaWorld website has some neat stuff. They have teacher guides, and one is about penguins but it is for older children. There is one activity thats neat though, it explains why penguins are white on white side and black on the other: http://www.seaworld.org/just-for-teachers/guides/pdf/penguin-k-3.pdf Its on page 13. They also have a live penguin cam where you can watch what the penguins at SeaWorld are doing right now! http://www.seaworld.com/sitepage.aspx?PageID=618 I'm going to be saving some of your activities, thanks!!
ReplyDeleteDon't you just love the little penguin tracks? And the iceberg game was fun for us too! I love the penguin books you've selected. We read SO many penguin books but never got our hands on the ones you mentioned!
ReplyDeleteI also love Min's blog - so many great ideas. It's neat that Bear has those penguins to play with. I like the idea of hatching the egg like Emperor Penguins do.
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