January is becoming one of my favorite times in Kindergarten. The
children can now "read, write, and discuss" as five year olds do.
Last year I felt like I was in a rut with my winter unit. I took to the internet, specifically, Simply Kinder's Facebook group searching for
inspiration.
I love providing my students with more open ended projects. The
year before I loved teaching the rainforest and taught them how to use kidrex.org to study the
animals. I loved how open ended the project was and the last thing I wanted was
to stand up in front of my kindergarten class and spit facts at them.
We send home a penguin report during this unit. The child chooses
a species of penguin and teaches the class about it. Each child researches
where it lives, what it eats, how it nests, and a special fact about the
penguin.
I realized that by teaching my students earlier how to research
they would be more successful with this project and their future ones. Someone
suggested making life size King penguin to compare the children's heights to
the Penguins. BOOM that was it. Each child would make their penguin life size.
Last year we use kidder.org, but this year it was not loading properly. The kind of loading that goes poorly when you have 13 students anxiously staring at their iPads. upon further examination i learned Google now uses kiddle.org.
I had them practice finding photos of my species of penguin.
I had remeasured and drawn the heights of each species on large butcher paper. Right now each
student had the name of a penguin, a large bulletin board piece of paper with a
line across the top and bottom showing how tall their penguin should be.
Next, they searched for a picture of their penguin. Once found
they drew their penguin. It had to touch the bottom of the page and the top line.
Amazingly most children did fabulously with this. After a day of drawing, we
took out the paints. My only stipulation was it must match the colors in your
picture. It was amazing how detailed they were. "Mrs. Resto I need pink
because my penguin has pink on his foot."etc.
My favorite part of this lesson came when the children cut them
out and lined up in order from tallest to smallest. Finally, each child created
a label for their penguin and we lined them up down our hallway. It made quiet
a statement to see the comparison in size up close.
In addition to these awesome penguins, we also practiced carrying
an egg on our feet, made penguin hats, watched the penguin cam.
