Saturday, January 18, 2014

Penguin Fun {Lots of Writing and a Freebie!}

Hello friends! We just finished up our week working on penguins and polar animals. My kinders loved it and we had so much fun! I love incorporating Science and Social Studies into my ELA. It doesn't happen every week, but it does happen often.
Each morning our message was about penguins. After a discussion, and sometimes brainstorming, students wrote about the topic in their journals.


On this day, our message was to inform my students that penguins hatch from eggs. We brainstormed what other animals hatched from eggs. They did awesome thinking of animals that hatched from eggs! 



We read several books about penguins and polar animals and discussed that we were learning facts. We talked about the difference between fact and opinion. To help with that concept we did a fact/opinion sort on penguins.
 All you have to do is print, cut out and sort on a pocket chart! And the best part...you can get them free from my store! {I'd love to have your feedback!}

On our last day we read a National Geographic about puffins.
We made a bubble map. After the lesson, I took the bubble map down. I decided to put it in my treasure box instead of trashing it like normal. The kids were excited and it was the first item taken from the treasure box that day. Score for me because it was free! 
 After our brainstorming, students go to work with their writing. I used a brace map with the words "The puffin" already there for them with each sentence. I wanted them to write 3 sentences about what they have learned. Our focus was more on retelling and writing what you have learned than correct sentence structure. So having the starter there already helped them with their writing. 
The writing came from my Polar Animals {No Prep Writing}



We just happened to earn a compliment party on Thursday. I let my kinders vote between doing a special surprise craft or a special surprise snack. Of course they chose snack! 

We made penguins out of bow-tie pretzels, big marshmallows and chocolate frosting. Very easy and yummy! 
 The finished product was cute. It doesn't exactly look like a penguin and we had chocolate frosting everywhere. But it was fun and that's what counts!

I'm so thankful we can now use YouTube at school on teacher computers. Just watch out for some crazy/inappropriate advertisement sometimes.
Here are some of the penguin videos we watched this week. 

This one is a documentary. My kinders loved seeing the penguins slide.

We LOVED this one!!




Now, I'm prepping for next week. We will be working on "The Mitten", celebrating 100th day and complete our unit on comparing numbers!

I'm linked up with A Classroom Full of Smiles for her lesson plan linky.
A Classroom Full of Smiles

And I'm linked up with Classroom Freebies.
Classroom Freebies Manic Monday

3 comments:

  1. We start penguins next week -- thank you for sharing!

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  2. Hi Lindsey. What a great lesson! Lots of fun going on in your room. Thanks for linking up!

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  3. I love using music also! Thanks for searching out these great ones. We love Jack Hartman too!
    Sarah
    Teaching Resources for the Classroom

    ReplyDelete

I {puffy heart} love reading your comments!