Further Exploration of the Antarctica

We finished our penguin study this week by taking a closer look at the Emperor Penguin.  The K-Kids learned how the parent penguins take care of the egg and eventually the baby chick.  They learned about predators and prey and how the penguin can be both within a food chain.  The K-Kids also learned how other penguins build their nests and raise their young.  They did a great job comparing and contrasting the different ways penguins raise their young, and the K-Kids were so excited and involved in the conversations!


We put on our scientist hats this week as we discovered how penguins can survive in the coldest place on Earth.  They learned that some of the animals that live in Antarctica have a layer of blubber.  Blubber is a layer of fat beneath the skin.  Blubber acts as an insulator, helping the animals stay warm.  The K-Kids wanted to see if blubber would really keep them warm, so they did an experiment.  They each put their hand into a Ziploc bag filled with an extra layer of Crisco.  The Crisco acted as the layer of fat and it created a "blubber mitten".  They placed the blubber mitten in a  bowl of icy water and waited to see what happened.  They used describing words to tell how it felt to put each hand in the icy water.  The blubber mitten kept the K-Kids warm and the hand with no mitten was very cold!  The K-Kids also saw how oil repels water and learned that a penguin's feathers are really oily which allows the water to drop right off.

Measurement and graphing were the math lessons for this week.  The K-Kids took surveys and turned their information into a bar graph.  They then compared the bar graphs and made a conclusion based on their gathered information.  The K-Kids also learned more about  measuring lengths and used a tape measure to measure each other.  Once we gathered all of the information about how tall the kids were, we compared their heights to different penguins!  Everyone was taller than a Fairy Penguin but some kiddos were shorter than an Emperor Penguin!  The results are on the hallway wall.

Now that the K-Kids are penguin experts, they wrote non-fiction books about penguins or other subjects that they felt like they knew a lot about!  It was so fun to see their excitement about various topics and how motivated they were to write.  Their abilities to stretch words to write the sounds, incorporate WOW words, and beginning to recognize when to use uppercase and lowercase letters are really improving.  I am a proud teacher! :)

Have a great weekend!