Penguins Came to Sunny California!



 We have been working on a unit about penguins so the children could learn about an interesting animal and learning about non fiction text. I never expected them to love this so much. They were fasinated by these animals and I found so many books were available on this topic. Cinderella Penguin was the class favorite and got a warm round of applause when I finished. We made connections to the more traditional story which they were quite familiar with. Here are some of the activities I did to build their background of knowledge. I created a Power Point but I have no idea of how to put it on this blog. I need to find out and put it up for other teachers to use.

Here is the tree map we created as a class and notice that the branches are color coded to help them focus on each section.

Here is a simple book I created using photographs from the internet so they could learn about penguins.

The text of the book is supported by the pictures. They loved this!

Here is an example of a student reading the tree map and building a sentence off of the map. This is a great strategy for your ELL's and my kids love doing this. The student reads the sentence after building it and the class repeats it.

Here is a penguin activity I made for workshop time. The student looks at pictures and decides if they have one syllable, two, or three. It is so much fun to watch them clap these out quietly to check if they are correct! Kindergarteners are so funny.

We labeled the parts of a penguin and I gave them direct instruction on how to draw one. First we practiced on a wipeoff board and they did such a cute job! Why do they love penguins so much?