Arctic animals and gettin' ready for Christmas!

Since returning from Thanksgiving break, we have been merrily learning about Arctic animals.  My cuties LOVE learning about animals and have such a genuine love for them.  It makes my heart happy!

We started two weeks ago with learning about polar bears.  We started with a schema chart.  It's so precious to hear their thoughts about things.  This particular one made me giggle.  Do you see the misconception that polar bears live in igloos?  So cute!

We learned a lot on Pebble Go about polar bears and then changed some of our schema to misconception.

One of the new things we learned about polar bears was what they need to live.  We created group dioramas that had to have all of the things a polar bear would need to survive.

 

 We also did some polar bear writing.

 You can get this paper for free here!

For my district, we had to complete an assessment for science about student's ability to make predictions accurately through an ice melting experiment, so I tied in our little bears.  Students were asked to predict where an ice cube could melt the fastest out of a fridge, a shade tree, the sun, or under a table.  I made my ice cubes with little polar bears frozen in them and we placed the frozen bears in the 4 places to make our predictions and complete our experiment.  

 This led us to reading this book

which talks about the melting home of the Arctic.  This led my class to solving the problem of the melting Arctic.  They are so insistent on turning off lights and recycling more than ever!  It's so awesome that they say "I am turning off the lights to help the polar bears."

Another fun activity with polar bears was understanding blubber and how polar bears stay warm.  I let each kiddo stick their hand in this ice cold water (with my light up ice).  They all decided polar bears must be cold!  Then we learned about blubber and stuck our hands in the ice water with the blubber glove.  Our hands stayed warm!  I learned about this idea from the fabulous Mrs. Jump.

This week was a continuation of Arctic animals with a focus on caribou.  My cuties were tickled pink that caribou are reindeer and insisted on singing Rudolph the Red Nosed Caribou.  I didn't snap as many pictures of our caribou fun, but I did get our voting graph to decide which reindeer should pull Santa's sleigh.

 

We raced two clip art reindeer with balloon races.  The green reindeer went the furthest, so he was the little deer to pull the sleigh.

 

 We also did some reindeer writing...

 and a reindeer glyph.

 Our focus on math has been teen numbers (teenage numbers as we call them in my little room), so we did a little reindeer feeding game.  Student pairs got a reindeer, a dice with teenage numbers, a plate (reindeer have table manners, you know), and reindeer food.  Students rolled the dice and fed the reindeer that many pieces of food.  We wore reindeer glassed for extra fun!

These same little reindeer made a comeback at the end of our day at social center time.  I just about cried when I saw what my cuties did with the reindeer.

 Do you see that they lined them up to pull the (book box) sleigh and stuck a puppet of Santa into the sleigh!  So adorable and creative!

We also have a Santa's Workshop in our dramatic play center.  We only get 20 minutes at the end of the day for social learning, but it's so important and worth it for my cuties to have social time and a time to be creative.

 I have also been preparing a little gift for my kinder team for each day this week leading up to our WINTER BREAK!

Next week is all about gingerbread men fun!  I can't wait!