This past wee, we dove into all things penguins and my kids had a blast!!
I like to start our themes by letting the kids give me their schema  about our topic. I record it with stickies on our chart, then we add new learning throughout the week.

After reading lots of informational stories, we worked together to create a tree map. We attached them to our cute penguin crafts.

We also loved reading Tacky the Penguin! We listed his character traits then compared him to real penguins. {I forgot to snap a pic of the comparison, but you can grab it by clicking on the document!}

Of course, on Friday, we had to do the experiment to see how penguins stay warm and the kids loved it!

We also used penguins to review some math skills { I didn't get many pictures since we were VERY into the lessons!}
We worked on decomposing 10...

and comparing numbers...

and also decomposing teen numbers {we had a group of 10 on one iceberg and another group on the other iceberg}.

All of the math activities are in my Playful Penguins pack {along with the craftivity}.

I'm off to *hopefully* finish updating my groundhog pack...to say it was bad is an understatement!! Happy Saturday!

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Vickie

I had full intentions of getting this blog post written this weekend, but life kind of had other plans. Better late than never, right?
We finished up our penguin fun last week by reading Three Cheers for Tacky and comparing it to the original Tacky book.

We also compared Tacky to a real penguin.

In our writing center, we wrote about penguins and this one cracked me up!

"Penguins don't fly. Penguins eat fish. Penguins puke the on to their mouth for their babies."

We also used our penguin friends to help us practice comparing numbers. The kids took turns being either a fish or the penguin, while the other kids wrote the inequality. They loved this game! {You can get it here}

Friday, we started talking about friends and things friends do and ways they act {I think we all need a reminder about this time of year!}. We made a tree map about friends as a class, then made these cute friends to hold our individual tree maps.

We also started our Valentine fun by graphing candy hearts on Friday. First we sorted our hearts, then graphed them, and did our data page. You can get the graphs and data pages here as a freebie {there are 2 different versions}.

Lastly, congratulations Kelly Stahl! You won my Valentine's pack and Deeanna's Valentine math pack. We will send you them tonight! Happy Monday everyone!

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Vickie

This week we are learning about penguins and my kiddos are loving it!
We started yesterday by talking about what we already knew about penguins. Then we read an informational book and added our new learning to our chart.

{Thanks to Sarah at First Grader At Last for our chart inspiration}

Then, we watched a short little video and worked together to create a tree map about penguins. We made some cute penguins to hold our tree maps.

This can be found in my new pack I posted here.

Today, we read Tacky the Penguin and thought of words that described Tacky. Then, we made these cute Tacky crafts {thanks to Tammy at Live, Love, Laugh Everyday in Kindergarten for the pattern} and wrote about Tacky.

We've also been using penguins in math to make things a little more fun. Yesterday, we practiced decomposing teen numbers into a group of 10 and a number more. For the whole group activity, the kids had white boards and wrote the equation while we acted out the problem.

We had a group of 10 penguins on our Promethean board

And another group standing on our "iceberg"

After our whole group activity, we each did our own to help us practice making those tricky teen numbers!

Today, we worked on decomposing ten. We used our iceberg again and we pretended to be penguins on our ten frame iceberg. Then, we had to figure out how many more penguins we would need to make 10. Once again, during the whole group lesson we used our white boards.

They loved being the penguins!

We also did an individual activity.

All of the math activities can be found in a new mini pack I posted today along with the craft and writing. Click the picture below to see more. Hope you're having a great week!

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Vickie

This week was all about penguins...here's a peek at what we did

You can find the Tacky pattern here. Have a great weekend...and if you're trying to work ahead, you can find my Groundhog Games here and my new Valentine's pack here.

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Vickie

Thank you so much to Laura at Kinder Kraziness for featuring me on Someone New Sunday and thank you to all my new followers! Hopefully, you'll be able to find something useful here!

Here's a peek at some of our math centers for the week. Sorry for the repeats of some centers....we still need a little bit of practice in some areas. We're also beginning our penguin unit and 3D shape unit, so stay tuned for some pictures!

The Penguin War cards are here (Graphics are DigiWeb Studios). You can find my Mitten Math pack here and if you want to get started on some Groundhog Day centers, you can find my Groundhog Games pack here.

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Vickie