Ice and Polar Animals

For the past two weeks we have enjoyed learning about wintry things.  We focused on the letter's Ii and Pp and cold weather things such as as ice, icicles, igloos, polar bears, and penguins.

For the letter Ii we had fun with activities like ice cube painting, ice fishing, making icicles and igloos, and ice cream taste testing.  

By far, the favorite activity of the week was ice fishing.  The students used a magnetic fishing pole to fish letters out of the ice pond.  They had to correctly identify the letters that they fished out of the pond and count the number of "letter fish" they had at the end.  Not only were the students sharpening their counting and letter recognition skills but this was a great exercise for hand eye coordination.  Most students tried to fish for a certain letter and they had to work really hard to make sure the magnet landed on that specific letter.

Ice cube painting was also a lot of fun and messy!  

Making icicles using glue and glitter.  First the students squeezed a thick line of glue on the top of their paper and then held the paper upright to let it drip, forming icicles.  They added white glitter and then practiced writing the letter Icicles on their paper.

Another Ii activity; finding the letters that make up our Initials.

Enjoying Ice cream for a snack.  Earlier in the day, we had an ice cream tasting game.  Each student closed their eyes and tasted a flavor of ice cream and then had to guess what flavor it was.  They did really well identifying the taste without seeing the ice cream.

Ii is for igloo

One day it was so cold we did not go outside, so we made our own winter fun in the classroom.  We donned our mittens and played with snow in the classroom!

Another fun snow activity - shaving cream and cornstarch.

For the letter Pp, we had fun completing activities such as making fluffy polar bears, mosaic penguins, pipe cleaner number beading, and completing activities based on Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr.

To make polar bears, we used a mixture of shaving cream and glue and then we spread the mixture on a paper plate.  We glued on eyes, ears and nose and let the mixture dry.  Check out our cute, fluffy polar bears.

To make our mosaic penguins, the students used their fine motor skills to tear paper into small pieces. Then glue those pieces into a penguin shape.

After reading Polar Bear, Polar Bear, we colored the animals from the book and then sequenced them into the correct order.

Pipe cleaner number beading. The students added the correct amount of beads to their pipe cleaner indicated by the number on top of the pipe cleaner.

Our Perfect list of Pp words

Since we were talking about Polar animals, we conducted a science experiment to find out how polar animals survive in the cold, arctic waters.  We discussed how animals such as polar bears have layers of fat that keep their bodies warm when they are in frigid temperatures.  To test our theory, first we felt how cold icy water is.  We could only leave our hand in the icy water for a few seconds.  Next, we put on a rubber glove, covered it with shortening, and then wrapped our hand with saran-wrap to create the fat layers needed to withstand icy water.  When the students put their hand in the water with the layers, they noticed that, although the water was still cold, they were able to keep their hand in the water for a longer period of time.  

We also had a lot of fun exploring our Polar animal sensory bin complete with snow, arctic animals, and pictures of polar bears.