Littles Learning Link Up: Penguin Unit- Lesson 3: Comparing Penguins of the World

Littles Learning Link Up is back on Tuesday!!

Each month you will find:

• Posts where I share what I have been up to with my elementary-age children and the preschoolers I work with at our homeschool co-op (including occasional highlight posts where I share how we used ideas that have been linked up here on Littles Learning Link Up).
• The occasional round up post.

Each week, I will host a link up, where you can share either what you have been up to recently, or old posts that may go with the theme.  Feel free to link up more than one post.

Each week I will continue to feature a couple of posts from those that have been linked up. 

I hope you will continue to share your wonderful posts, and I hope you will find something new to try with your child(ren).

It would be great for everyone to stop by and visit the other linked-up posts as well. Check them out, leave some comments, pin those that interest you. Let's make this a real party and socialize with each other.

Here's a peek at what we have been up to in our homeschool.

We are still working on geography with Let's Go Geography. Though in our history reading, we haven't gotten past China. Tabitha has gotten a few weeks ahead of us, because she does her reading independently. She has also started reading a book about George Washington from YWAM Publishing.The younger children and I will read through it slower, using the unit study that we received. 

I'm working on Reading Comprehension with Hannah, using the PRIDE Reading Program. We also received some Early Reader Box Car Children books that Harold read quite quickly. I plan on him rereading at least one to do some sort of project with it.

Moving on to our preschool lesson:

We have been continuing with our penguin lessons.

We sing the songs I came up with every week.

Did You Ever See a Penguin (tune of Did You Ever See a Lassie)

Did you ever see a penguin, a penguin, a penguin

did you ever see a penguin waddle around?

Waddle this way and that way, waddle this way and that way

Did you ever see a penguin waddle around?

See the Penguins (tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb)

See the penguins standing there, standing there standing there

See the penguins standing there,

In Antarctica

They would go tobogganing, tobogganing, tobogganing

The would go tobogganing

Down the snowy hill.

Of course I have motions and movements for these like our songs from last year.

We also sang our snowy, winter songs from last winter.

We read the book Penguin and Little Blue by Katherine Tillotson.

In this book, Penguin and Little Blue are together in an aquarium and they end up going on "tour" throughout the United States. However, what Penguin really wants is to go back home to Antarctica to be with his own kind. At the end of the book they end up taking a ship there and Little Blue stays with Penguin. 

This sort of led into a discussion of different penguins and how they live in different parts of the world. We learned that the blue penguin wouldn't have lived on Antartica, but over near Australia and New Zealand. I showed the children pictures of eight different penguins and we learned their names and where they lived, plus how tall they are. 

I made little copies of each penguin picture for the children to glue onto a map I printed out and glued into a file folder.

We put the penguins where they live. It does make me curious how many people think all penguins live in Australia. Did you know the majority live on the islands north of Antarctica, and then there are those that live on the southern tips of South America and Africa?

Before the lesson I taped black pieces of paper together to represent the different penguins' heights.

Then, the children took turns measuring the "penguins" with my tape measure.

After we were done measuring each one, I hung it up next to the emperor penguin we made the week before. We didn't make the other ones into penguins because I wanted to be able to reuse the paper.

Then we began a salt dough hand penguin project that I had seen on Messy Little Monster. I had the children help measure and pour the ingredients for the salt dough. Then I kneaded it/

We gave the children a piece big enough to flatten out for their handprint.

It wasn't until two weeks later that they got to paint their penguins as most of our class was gone the following week. 

They started out by painting the handprint white. The palm was the iceberg and the fingers were the penguins.

Then they painted the outer part blue for water, and we helped them paint the black outline and flippers, plus add feet and orange beaks. 

Aren't they cute. Sadly, we had forgotten to poke a hole in the top while they were still soft, so they couldn't hang them up as planned.

The week that we only had a couple of children, we made lapbooks I had purchased from Mrs. Jones Creation Station to learn more details about penguins, such as anatomy, life cycle, where they live, what their prey is, and what preys on them, some more different types of penguins, and what they are, can do, and look like

Our unit wrapped up and we started a unit on Under the Sea.

Here are a couple of things I would like to share with you:

Penguins, Penguins All Around Round Up

Arctic Fun Round Up

Now onto:

Littles Learning Link Up Features

On my last Littles Learning Link Up post, there were 6 wonderful posts linked up. I will be sharing a the most clicked on post, plus a randomly selected post.

Please, don't forget to stop by other posts that are linked up. See what catches your eye, stop by, pin the post to a relevant board, and perhaps leave a comment to let the author of the blog know you have been by for a visit. I know I appreciate others commenting and letting me know they have read my posts, so I am sure others do too.

This week's most clicked on post is:

Gale from Imaginative Homeschool shared A Heart-Full Kindergarten Valentines Day.

This week's randomly selected post is:

Megan from My Full Heart shared ABC Jesus Loves Me: Year 1, Week 3

Join the Party!

I would love to have you join in this week! What sort of activities do you do with your young children? Do you have some favorite activities you would like to share? I invite you to link up below. I will be pinning posts on one of my relevant boards, and I would love to feature some of the activities each week from what is linked up.

Please know I may share a picture from your post and link back to it, along with sharing how we used your idea in our school time. By linking up you are giving me permission to use a picture from your post. I will ALWAYS give credit and link back. Additionally, if you choose to try out any of the ideas with your child, please make sure you give credit where credit is due.

Linky will be open through Monday night, to give me time to check out all the posts and get the Features organized. Please take the time to visit some of the other wonderful posts linked up.

No button currently, and there won't be one until I can figure it out seeing as Photobucket has changed things. Feel free to still share the picture in place of the button. Just link it to my Littles Learning Link Up permalink please.

I am sharing over at

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

5 Days of ... Making Geography Fun- Day 3: On the Road

We only just arrived home from our trip to the Creation Museum last night, so I wanted to share how we included geography in our trip, because you know, children are always learning, not just during lesson time.

It wasn't anything fancy. We just let the children have a map, which can be found for free at rest stops. 

As we traveled down the road the children would ask where we were and I would show them on the map. I also let them know which direction we had traveled and where we still needed to go. When we stopped at the rest stop we also showed them the map they had on display pinpointing where we were.

The older girls had a pretty good understanding. Hannah just had fun looking at the map.

She thought she was going to be able to find specific places, like restaurants and such. We tried to explain that those kinds of landmarks would not be found on a state map. 

Now that we are home I plan to pull out the map and go over the trip again showing them where we were and seeing if they remember some of the places we stopped. 

If I had done more planning I think I would have marked our trip out on the map with a highlighter and marked some specific roads, intersections and cities. Then, when we past through those places the children could have marked them on the map to get a better feel for how far we had come and how far we still had to go. Poor Tabitha felt like she was going to spend her entire life in the van and we would never get there (she may be a bit on the over-dramatic, worrier side).

So, how to you include learning on road trips?

As I mentioned, there are many more insightful posts to be found. Here is the link to the main post on the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog where you can find a list of everyone who is sharing. To get you started, I invite you to stop by these blogs:

Dawn @ Guiding Light Homeschool ~ Homeschooling with Excessive Energy
Lexi @ Lextin Academy ~ The Homeschool Dad, CEO
Lynn @ Ladybug Chronicles ~ Organizing Your Home and School
Cristi @ Through the Calm and Through the Storm ~ Homeschooling Thankfulness
Melissa@ Mom's Plans ~ Historical Field Trips
Adena @ AdenaF ~ Mnemonics
Amy @ Homeschool Encouragement ~ Lego Learning
Erin @ For Him and My Family ~ Record Keeping

5 Days of ... Making Geography Fun- Day 1: Interactive Town Maps

Welcome to the Schoolhouse Review Crew's 5 Day Blog Hop. This time around there is no specific theme, each Crew member will be sharing a subject of their own choosing with a new post each day this week. There are going to be posts like Making Homeschooling Fun,  Family Friendly Finger Food, Babywearing and Clearing Out the Clutter. 

I will be sharing some ways to make geography fun for young children. 

When the girls were younger they really enjoyed watching Dora the Explorer. Originally my thinking was that the show would be a nice introduction to Spanish for the girls. I then realized it is a great show for an introduction to map skills. I love the way there are several landmarks they need to be looking for as Dora and Boots travel to their destination. I thought it would be fun to create a map of our town.

I found an aerial map of our town online and copied the main streets and river into a file folder. We live in a town that is only 1 mile around, so this was pretty easy. For bigger towns or cities you would probably want to concentrate on a smaller area to start with. 

We went around town, taking pictures of important buildings and other landmarks. I printed out 2 copies of each picture. One copy went onto the map and then I covered the entire thing with clear contact paper (the poor man's laminator). Then I "laminated" the second set of pictures so they could be matched onto the map.

The idea is to take the map around town and match the landmarks as you go.   You could also pick one as a destination and two or three others as stops along the route to plan fun activities (sort of like Dora). Another thought is to print a third set out and play a matching/memory game. The last landmark matched can be the destination for a fun trip. 

Though we made the map a few years ago, we just recently used it as we took a walk around town in an attempt to fill in some more details about our town. I posted about this in my Poppins Book Nook post, Map Skills with Mapping Penny's World.

There are many more insightful posts to be found. Just click on the banner below to head to the main post on the Schoolhouse Review Crew blog where you will find a list of everyone who is sharing. To get you started, I invite you to stop by these blogs:

Dawn @ Guiding Light Homeschool ~ Homeschooling with Excessive Energy
Lexi @ Lextin Academy ~ The Homeschool Dad, CEO
Lynn @ Ladybug Chronicles ~ Organizing Your Home and School
Cristi @ Through the Calm and Through the Storm ~ Homeschooling Thankfulness
Melissa@ Mom's Plans ~ Historical Field Trips
Adena @ AdenaF ~ Mnemonics
Amy @ Homeschool Encouragement ~ Lego Learning
Erin @ For Him and My Family ~ Record Keeping

Summer Learning Fun: Swapping Adventures

We have officially put aside our My Father's World Kindergarten curriculum until the middle of August when we will again start back up. We are taking the summer to relax and do some fun activities. Of course, we are always learning. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we were going to be participating in some fun swapping adventures through the Facebook group, Homeschool Swapping Adventures to help learn a little bit about the different states. We have since sent out and received our June postcards and are working on our July postcards.

These are the postcards we sent.

These are the postcards we have received so far.

Here the girls are coloring in the corresponding states on their USA maps. 

In addition, we finally got our Flat Travelers sent out to their host family. We are eagerly awaiting the travelers we are going to host. 

 I made little name tags for them. I just attached them with some tape.

I included a journal for the host family to fill out and we slid them into the envelope.

Off they go to Tennessee.

I am linking to:

And a couple of new linkies: