Penguins, Penguins, Penguins

What's black and white and red all over??

A penguin with a sunburn!! (Maybe one who recently visited Hawaii.)

For the last two weeks our class has had a lot of fun learning all about penguins.

We started with a simple book that is in our basal reader.

This is one of my favorite stories in our basal series and now that Common Core is focusing more on non-fiction text, I decided to bump it up a bit and integrate penguins into a two week theme.

Last week we started with reading the story as a class, then we read it with a buddy and made flip books with our vocabulary words from the text. I forgot to take pics of the flip books :(

The kids were fascinated with some of the facts they read and I wanted them to see how large Emperor Penguins really are.  So I decided to make a life size one for my class.

I just painted it onto butcher paper (All I had was green, lol)  I cut it out and hung it up.

My students loved it.

This week with a little help from my bloggy friends I added a few more activities to our week of learning.

Ms. T from Journey of a substitue teacher has a great pack called Perfectly Penguin.

One of these activities has fact cards about each penguin and then a graphic organizer to help students write facts for each one.  I used my favorite teaching tool, sheet protectors, and just had them write the facts with a dry erase marker.  Perfect for a center activity.

Angelia from Extra Special teaching has a unit called  Emperor and Rockhopper Penguins.

There are some great printable books that I added to my Penguin Book Bucket.

You can print out a full color class book too!

I really love this Penguin Activities Pack from Rebecca at Teaching First.

I used lots of her great activities.  

It is filled with so many ideas, and I am sad we don't have another week to spend on it!!

We also made our own little fact booklets.

My students learned so much and had so many options for writing.  I just love this story that one little girl wrote.  She was so serious!

Finally we did some penguin art.  I taught the students how to draw a penguin and then we talked about the "cool" colors they would see in the Antarctic.  

I think they did an amazing job!!

There are so many wonderful ideas and activities and we could have easily added in another week of penguins!

I ended the week with a fun movie that I absolutely love!

Who doesn't love surfing penguins??

I have owned this movie for years and have watched it over and over with each class and my own kids.

If you haven't seen it, it is a lot of fun and the soundtrack is great!

I leave you with this great video I found on You Tube.  I need to figure out how to download it to show my students, since we can't access You Tube at school.

What are you working on for these colder months?  Our next story is Dear Mr. Blueberry, which is a great because it is whale season here in Hawaii!!