P is for Penguin

(Kenna is 35 months old.)Antarctica is an interesting part of the world, and since we aren't seeing much snow here in our neck of the woods, I thought it would be a good first continent to learn about in Geography. I pulled out our Penguin Toob and we got to work with some fun penguin and snow themed-trays.

 Of course, we started with an iceberg. And since Dora is our favorite little friend, we became Diego and tried to rescue Baby Penguin. (Notice the glass of ice water, with a straw? I think all that talk about ice and water made her thirsty...)

 We used salt water in a squirt bottle. We talked a lot about why salt makes ice melt, and all about how water freezes into ice. She was rivoted.

 And Kosher salt to sprinkle around. It ate through the ice beautifully.

 Finally, Diego spotted the poor baby penguin's feet. He was in desperate need of rescue.

 Tada! Rescued! We did it! We did it!

P is for peanuts, the perfect snack for after rescuing a penguin.

Here are our trays for the week.

 

:Counting:
Use snowflake stampers to count to ten. Stamp one snowflake next to the number 1, stamp two next to the number 2.  Talk about snowy/icy Antarctica.

:Pattern Blocks:
I love this cute pattern block penguin mat. It's black and white, which should be harder compared to last week, where the pattern mat was color-coded.
From Prekinders.

 :Playdoh:
White playdoh snow for our penguins to play in and make tracks in. We love our homemade playdoh.

 :Penguin Identification:
Five species of penguins, to talk about differences in each penguin species. These little cards are great- they are meant to be strung up in a mobile, but they are really detailed illustrations and have the species name labeled. Printable at Scholastic.

 :Continent Map:
I got this great idea from AdventuresofBear. Turn a world map into a puzzle of the seven continents. Ours is backed with magnets and stored on a cookie sheet. Kenna and I have been placing and naming all of the continents, but this week we will examine the map and find Antarctica.

 :Thermometer Clipping:
Use these great little cards from Making Learning Fun to learn how to read a thermometer. Kenna practices with the thermometer every day during calendar time, so she will likely understand this quickly. Also, these cards practice reading "tens" numbers.

 :Matching:

Snowflake patterns to put back together. The snowflakes are all black and white, so Kenna will have to acutally match the pattern on the cards. I did simplify it a little by splitting the cards into two compartments, lefts and rights. Got these here.

:Penguin Cards:

I was going to attempt to turn these amazing cards into three-part cards, but I decided that Kenna is going to love looking at the pictures, and be done. I may still create an extra set of labels for her to match up, but with words like "Galapogos" and "Emperor", I'm not sure it matters if she can ID them or not.  The cards are from Lapbooks.com.