Penguins & Polar Bears - Oh My!

Last week was my first week back at school after our family tragedy last week. It was very tough to go back but I needed to get back into the swing of things. This will be a long post, but I wanted to share the fun and very educational things we learned about! There are even some neat freebies in this post for you!

Last week we studied penguins and polar bears. These are always interesting for the kids to learn about but my boys especially get into learning about these animals for some reason. This year we did lots of fun things to learn about both animals. I got some great ideas from Kathy Griffin's posts on penguins and polar bears. She listed some excellent YouTube video clips to show my kinders as well as some fun books to read. 

We began our week by learning about polar bears. We read both nonfiction and fiction books about polar bears. These are some of the books we read:

Since we obviously don't have polar bears roaming the wilds of SC, my kinders got to watch some great YouTube videos about polar bears. This really helped them to see what real polar bears look and act like. So many of my kinders will never see a live polar bear even in a zoo because it is just too far (geographically and economically) away from us. 

After learning about polar bears, we did some writing about them. We made a chart on our interactive projector about what polar bears can, have and are. 

The kinders made their own version of this chart to add to their science journals.

You can get your own copy of this chart by clicking on this link. Please leave me some comment love and feedback if you choose to download it and use it!

Polar Bears Can, Have, Are

The next day, we made a precious polar bear craft from Lauryn Kirk Balogh (It is FREE in her TpT store!!). Then my kinders used the chart they made to write about the polar bears. These are some of the finished products.

This writing sheet and the others you will see posted in the rest of this post are part of a new winter unit pack I have been working on. I hate that it isn't finished but hopefully I will have it finished soon. If not, I am sure it will be posted before next winter. 

We also pretended to be polar bears and wrote about what we would do.

We also learned about penguins. We read both nonfiction and fiction books about them. Here are some of our selections:

We also did a Penguins chart on the board and in our science journals, but I forgot to take pictures of those. I did remember to take pictures of the finished writing papers. 

I was amazed at how much they learned last week despite me not feeling totally up to par.