Penguin Reports in Kindergarten

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.

Rainforest creation

Teaching the rainforest is one of my favorites. I particularly like it because it's a great opportunity for my kids to independently research an animal.

I'll have to explain the research "how to" in another post, but basically up until now we have done our research whole group. As we study the 4 layers of the rainforest, we set to work creating one on our hallway wall.

We begin by creating safari people and field journals. My grade partner and I found these safari people here. The kids love creating their faces with the construction paper.

The remainder of the rainforest is up to the children to create. We discuss layers, vegetation, and animals.

My favorite activity is when they choose an animal to research, draw, and then paint. To help them with spelling for their first animal, I have them choose one of the animal cards that we have been sorting into the different layers all last week.

Using their IPads and kidrex.org now kiddle.org. We have already discussed choosing sites that use a picture icon that fits your search. After they find a site and a picture of their animal, they draw it.

We talk about using our observation skills. Think about size, shape, color etc. Due to our time constraints this project takes two days.

On the second day we paint our animals. The children again use their IPads to find the animals photo and paint what they see. I love the details they include. Many will ask for pink or light blue because they see a bit in their picture. They must choose all their colors etc. It is not my work, so it is not my job to do it for them (my motto).

On day three and four we repeat this whole process but they must choose another animal and they may choose any animal they wish not necessarily one from the sort cards. This year we mixed it up and used pastels on our second animal.

The children also painted leaves for trees and cut vines to hang. It by far is one of my favorite displays we did all year. The other classes loved walking by as it was so bright and colorful for early spring!

 What are your favorite units to teach?