Mrs. Garrabrant's Classroom: Penguin Study

With yet another short week (I am sick of saying that), we were able to get a lot accomplished! We finished our world map and here are some pictures of our progress throughout the week. First we started by ripping white paper and gluing it onto the polar areas (North Pole/Arctic & South Pole/Antarctica).

Then we ripped brown and green paper to use for our land. We glued it to our map in the outlined areas to represent the remaining continents.

Finally, we ripped blue paper to represent the oceans and other bodies of water and glued them onto the remaining spaces of our map. The students are so proud of their work and they were so excited when we finished that the whole class started clapping! I think it looks pretty awesome as well!

Like I mentioned in the previous post, the kids decided they wanted to do a penguin study. This week we looked at where the 17 different types of penguins live and they were amazed to find out not all of them live in cold climates! We looked at this map in a book where it had all of the pictures of the penguins as well as a colored dot above their picture. The corresponding colored dot was on the map where that penguin lives. The students wanted to do something similar to this on our map as well.

The map below is an interactive map I found on the website Penguin World. You can find the map by clicking on the link listed here: http://www.penguinworld.com/map/map.php. It lists 16 of the 17 types of penguins and when you scroll over the different types, you can see where that type of penguin lives. We discussed how this map is different from the one we made because it is circular just like looking at it from the bottom of our globe. This site will help us when making our map.

We looked at many penguin books this week and one of the kids favorite things we looked at where these pages that listed the different types of penguins heights from smallest to biggest. The students were also inspired by this as well and we will be using this to create something interesting for our map.

I brought in a tape measure and showed them how tall each penguin was. The Emperor penguin is 44 inches and they couldn't believe how tall that was! I had a couple kids come up to show them that it is even taller than they are! We also found out that some penguins are shorter than some of the kids also.

We compared the shortest penguin (the Fairy/Little) to the tallest penguin (Emperor) and they thought it was interesting that there was such a height difference between the two.

We measured all of the kids and found out how tall they were.

I found these penguin cutouts and we put stickers from their school pictures to make the children look like penguins. I called each of our "Penguins" over and like you saw above we measured how tall they were. We documented underneath their penguin how many inches tall they were. The kids thought it was hilarious to see themselves as a penguin!

We continued to do our polar animal rescue and the children really enjoyed it. They had a great time working together to use the materials provided to try to get the animals out of the ice block.

The children also continued to create habitats for penguins and other various polar animals in our I Wonder stations. Check out David and Shelby's penguin nest below.

On Friday we went to Mrs. Gore's classroom to see something really cool that her friends have been working on. They have been making number scrolls out of hundreds charts and recycled paper towel rolls. One of her students is writing numbers in the 1,100's!! I thought our kids would enjoy doing something like this and it really inspired them to want to try it also. Although we had some of our friends that told us they thought it was too hard! We explained to them that her kids didn't do this work in a day but that it took them a lot of time to work on them and we can do it too. They are excited to try it themselves!

Since Groundhogs day was this weekend we talked about it on Friday and the kids voted on whether they thought the groundhog would see his shadow or not. They surveyed their classmates and filled out a graph to figure out what the majority of them thought. Most of our friends thought the groundhog would see his shadow, and he did!

Dr. Clifford also came to visit on Friday to talk to the students about the 40 developmental assets, their journey through school and West Carrollton spirit! The kids enjoyed participating in the West Carrollton cheer and saying "Aarrrgh" like a pirate as loud as they could!