Plenty about Penguins

Last week we learned a lot interesting facts about penguins.  We began the week by making a KWL.  We always like to brainstorm a list of things we know when we begin a new unit.  As you can see from our chart we knew several things about penguins before we ever got started.  We also made a list of a few things we wanted to know about penguins.  All week long we added to the list of things we learned.  We decided penguins are pretty amazing animals.  

KWL Chart

Here are a few books we read about penguins.

One thing we learned is that penguins have blubber to keep them warm.  We did a little experiment to see exactly what blubber is and how it keeps penguins warm.  Here are some pictures of us soaking one hand directly in ice cold water and the other hand inside a bag of blubber.  We were amazed at how warm our hand in the bag of blubber stayed.

       

We also learned that Emperor penguins grow to be about the size of a six year old. That’s as big as us!!!   After the mother penguin lays an egg the father penguin puts the egg on his feet and protects in until it hatches.  Here are some Emperor Penguins we made. 

       

We practiced writing SUPER sentences by brainstorming lists of words and choosing one word from each list to write a sentence about a penguin.  Then we illustrated each one of our sentences.     

Our final writing activity of the week was inside this cute penguin art project.  We all wrote at least five things we learned about penguins.  It’s amazing how much everyone can write when they know so much about the topic.  This really was some of our best writing of the year.