Tot and Preschool Time Week of Nov 4-8 More Penguin Fun

We didn't do very much for school this week. We continued on with our habitats for Penguins.  Here are the finished snow scenes.

Hannah's

Harold's

Amelia's

Tabitha

Then I remembered the Global Art book we reviewed over the summer had a section on Antarctica, so I found a fun snowflake craft.

I was staring at this shoebox which has a little pompom sized hole in the side, thinking it would make a fun activity for Harold.

Hide the Pompoms:

Peek-a-boo

Oh, wait, dump the pompoms.

Harold also likes to use this activity cube at times. It keeps him busy when we try to get work done.

What would a letter P unit be without some pudding. Harold and Hannah were my helpers in the kitchen to make some Chocolate Peanut Butter Pudding.

Pouring in the pudding mix.

Pouring in the milk.

Mixing the pudding.

Don't forget to add the peanut butter, two heaping tablespoons to be exact.

And the reward for being such good helpers?

Yummy!!

Then mommy added the pudding to their P muffin tins in the form of penguins.

This week at co-op the preschool class made turkeys.

They colored the bodies.

And glued on tail feathers.

I had them rip strips of fall-colored construction paper into little pieces.

Harold's

Hannah's

(I love that she tried to write her name. I can see the H's!)

I think most of our learning about penguins this past week came from the books we read at rest time. We read some informational books and some fun "pretend stories that can't really happen," as Amelia called them.

Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers

A cute little story about a penguin and a boy. The boy thinks the sad-looking little penguin who knocks on his door is lost, so they embark on an adventure to return him to the South Pole. He discovers that he wasn't lost after all.

Don't Be Afraid Little Pip by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman

Another cute little story that helps reassure young children that they do not need to be afraid. Little Pip is afraid of learning to swim for the first time and would much rather fly like the other birds. 

Penguins by Liz Pichon

In this book the penguins live in a zoo instead of in the wild. One day a little girl drops her camera into the penguin enclosure and the penguins have a grand old time with it. I love the pictures that she finds after she develops her film.

A Penguin Story by Antoinette Portis

Every day the colors are the same: black, white and blue. Edna, the little penguin feels there must be some other colors in the world. She sets off to find them and when she does she asks her friends to join her. 

Amazing Animals: Penguins by Valerie Bodden

In this informational book we learned a little bit about different penguins. Each double page spread consists of a full page color photograph with the other page being a short paragraph of information with some new vocabulary being learned as well. 

My favorite informational book tells the story of the mother penguins. So many of the other books focused on the father staying behind with the egg and newborn chick or on the family together. In 

A Mother's Journey by Sandra Markle and Alan Marks

we follow the new mommy emperor penguins as they head for the sea. There are a lot of descriptive words that help tell of their journey. The illustrations really help to make this a memorable book. 

We still have a few more penguin books we haven't read yet. I will share the remainder next week as we conclude our Penguin unit.

Tot and Preschool Time with the letter P

We started our P: Penguin unit with My Father's World this past week. I love the letter P because there is so much to do.

The children started out by coloring their P pictures. Harold prefers to glue, so I allowed him to make a Pink and Purple collage on his paper.

Hannah has been working on her cutting skills and cuts out her pictures to make a letter book for each letter/sound.

We will finish the book this coming week.

It has been a while since the children have done any Montessori-type activities. I decided this would be the perfect time to bring a couple out because we could use Pom-poms for spooning and sorting.

Hannah started out with spooning some multi-colored pom-poms.

I then realized that using only the black and white pom-poms would be fun because they could represent the colors of the penguins we were learning about.

Harold does very well with spooning. Except, he did try to eat them after using it properly for a few minutes.

Hannah also worked on some color sorting.

We had a Letter P muffin tin.

As we were cleaning out our pumpkins and getting ready to carve them the girls were having fun trying to put the correct tops on the pumpkins. We decided to make a game out of it. I arranged the pumpkins in a semi-circle with the tops randomly set out in front of them. I then timed the girls to see how long it took them to put the tops on the correct pumpkins. 

Lately Harold wants to do everything the girls are doing. He had a blast playing with the lids.

Oh, the lids make great hats too according to Harold.

This week at co-op we made pumpkin patches. I had done this with Tabitha when she was a young toddler, before I started my blog. I had them draw squiggly lines on green paper to represent the vines. Then they glued on 10 pumpkins. 

We finished them off by counting and writing the numbers 1-10.

Here is Hannah's pumpkin patch.

And this is Harold's pumpkin patch.

For a penguin craft I thought it would be fun for the younger two to make shape penguins. Tabitha and Amelia also wanted to make one. 

Our penguins have black oval bodies, white circle bellies, circle eyes, orange triangle beaks, star feet (and we added rectangle wings after Tabitha realized they looked funny without wings).

I asked Harold to show me his penguin so I could get a picture. This is how he showed it to me, he pointed at it. 

We talked about where penguins live. I found two great interactive maps. This first one shows a map of the world and the red highlighted areas are where penguins live. When you click on an area information comes up about the kind of penguin that lives there. With this second map when you move your cursor over the name of each kind of penguin it will show you a picture of the penguin and move it down to where the penguin lives. Though there are some penguins that live in other places, the MFW unit focuses on Emperor penguins so we talked about them living in Antarctica. We watched some videos showing the male penguins huddled up in the winter keeping warm against the wind and snow. This site has some great videos and pictures, of lots of different animals. Then we decided our penguins should experience a snow storm. 

We used our air pop popcorn popper without its lid so the popcorn could fly all over. We did this a year ago when we were on Day 2 of the creation unit.

Then we painted our penguins a little snowy habitat.

We read some great informative books on penguins.

Emperor Penguins Up Close: Zoom in on Animals by Carmen Bredeson

This girls and I took turns reading the information on each page. Each double page spread focuses on one feature of the Emperor penguin, showing a close up picture as well. 

The Emperor's Egg by Martin Jenkins

This tells the story of the Emperor Penguin's egg from when the mom leaves it with the dad through the mom returning so dad can go off and eat. I love the way it involves the reader by asking questions, and there are additional details in italics at the bottom of some pages.

The Little Penguin by A.J. Wood

This is a cute story of a newly hatched little Emperor penguin who wants to look like his father. He gets lost as they are traveling to the sea and discovers his feathers are falling out. When he meets back up with his family he goes swimming and finds that he has lost his baby feathers and looks like his dad. Though it is a cute story it wasn't very factual when compared to the other books we have read. Still, the children enjoyed it.

Penguin Chick by Betty Tatham

(a Let's Read and Find Out Science book)

This book was quite informative. Though we were reading some repetitive information, we were also introduced to some new vocabulary that the other books hadn't used, like brood pouch and tobogganing. 

We have many other penguin books we are going to be reading as we finish up our P:Penguin unit. I will be sharing them next time. 

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