Our first week of school in the new year got off to a great start with a theme on Winter Animals! We began the week by discussing Hibernating Animals. On Monday, we read the book “Winter Lullaby” by Barbara Seuling and learned how different animals hibernate through the winter. Then we put together “My Winter Lullaby” booklet…
We then did an experiment about hot and cold and how Winter Animals react to them. I filled two bins with water, one hot and one cold. I gave each student two bear cutouts and told them to crumple each one tight.
Then I had them hold their crumpled bears above the bins – one over the cold water and one over the hot water – and told them to drop them in.
The crumpled bear in the cold water will be slow to absorb the water and “sleep” like it’s Winter. The other bear in hot water will absorb the water faster and “wake up” like it’s Spring.
On Tuesday, we studied the Inuit people of the Arctic. We read “Mama, Do You Love Me?” by Barbara Joose. The illustrations are so beautiful plus there are many references to the Inuit way of life in the book.
For this lesson, we made Inuit children based on ourselves:
And here is our bulletin board:
On Wednesday, we concentrated on Circles and the letter W for Winter. First we reviewed Circles using the circle pages from the 2D SHAPES Unit in my KEY TO KINDERS TPT Store.
Here’s one of our finished circle piggies:
In the second part of our day, we concentrated on the letter W by practicing how to write and recognize W using the ABC PRACTICE PAGES from my KEY TO KINDERS TPT Store:
After our W practice, we brainstormed a Winter Acrostic Poem:
Click HERE for this FREEBIE Worksheet:
On Thursday, we focused our Winter Animals unit on Polar Bears and made this cute craft:
The snout is an individual fruit cup container that I spray painted white (or you can have the children paint it with acrylic paint) or you can use a small white paper or styrofoam cup. The children crumpled up white tissue paper squares and glued to a paper plate. The ears were circles cut from black and white card stock I then hot-glued the ears, snout and nose to the plate to finish. Very easy, very cute and makes a great hanging craft!
Finally on Friday we learned what it felt like to be an Arctic animal with blubber. I tied two pillows around the middle of the students and had them perform various tasks like tie their shoes and lay down to sleep. They had a ball!
Afterwards, we colored our Arctic Animal bingo boards and glued them together before playing the game.
Sheesh! We had a busy week! Hope you can use some of these ideas for your own classroom!
Blessings,
