My three youngest students and I have a very special week planned! Our three older students and their brothers are in some special classes this week, so it seemed the perfect week to jump into some “icy” fun with some penguins! 🙂

I noted recently that our two firsties are a bit rusty in their math skills, so some remediation was in order this week. Good news is they don’t think of it much as work! They had so much fun!

We started off our school time with an adorable and very successful Craftivity: Penguin Inkblot Painting. I can’t take credit for the idea. I found it on Pinterest, but you can click HERE to see the link yourself.

Since we covered SYMMETRY last week in our math lessons, this was a great project as we saw symmetry created before our eyes! They were enthralled with seeing this in action and taking part in making it happen. 🙂

Here they are in progress:

{I put the paint on just like the link suggested, and the kids {even my two-year-old} did the rest}.

{I encouraged them to take their fingertips to drag the paint out to make the penguins’ wings. They loved this part!}

{Love this pic of our two-year-old peeking as she opens her painting.}

Next we took 8 1/2 x 11 paper and added “snow” to the edges with torn white paper. Then we put it all on the counter to dry for a couple of hours.

After they were dry, our firsties cut out their penguins and I cut out baby girl’s penguin. Now it was time to glue them on their “snow” scene and add eyes, beaks, hair bows and bow ties, the two latter of which were inspired by Ms. Richi’s penguins (they really are that adorable)! I should add I had googly eyes, so we diverted from the original link on the eyes. For the beaks, I gave our firsties a square of orange paper. They cut out their beaks themselves. I love how they turned out so different! I cut out Sallie’s beak for her with guidance on what size she wanted. I knew she would get frustrated trying to make hers look “pewfect” like big sis and brother.

Our front door looks so much more inviting!

While our penguins dried, we had more penguin fun ahead! First we had snack time while we watched part of March of the Penguins. I highly recommend this older film. It is the closest science lesson you’ll get to being with penguins in the South Pole. Since the weather was cooperating, we decided to go outside and get a “feel” for what penguins feel everyday while waddling and sliding along the ice.

{This part was so funny because the penguins were … ahem … “getting married” (that is what I told them OK!), and Susannah was very interested in “why are they so close together?” I finally told her “this is how penguins and many other animals make babies.” That seemed to satisfy her because she said, “Oh. Like the chickens.” Yep.

A cabinet by our back door had ice on it, so we rubbed our hands on it. They tried to use their fingertips, but I encouraged them all to rub it with their whole hand. Of course, we all ran back inside quickly and said we can’t believe penguins live on ice all of their lives.

The following activities are a part of a brand-new resource I just finished. It is available at my TpT store, and I will be sending the ENTIRE resource to the FIRST PERSON to comment here and ask for it. 🙂 If you’ve read this far, you might be the lucky person.

It is 62 pages of penguin fun, and has 54 pages of printable resources for use in your classroom or homeschool. I have to stop here and GIVE THANKS to another TpT seller Richi Reynolds for sending me these adorable penguins FREE to use in this resource. She is having a linky party and invited other sellers to use her Pretty Penguins Clip Art in a product and link up. How fun is that?

Below, I’ll show just a few ways we used this resource today.

Number of the Day with Word Wall Cards (Someone has forgotten number 15. Uh-oh.)

Making sure there are 15 little penguins on our Word Wall cards.

The unit includes 4 Find the Sum or Difference worksheets for sums and differences 0–20. You can see one of those below. I placed ours in page protectors to use with dry erase markers, but they are in black and white and would certainly work as copies with pencils too! In addition, the unit includes 5 more pages of What’s That Number? half-page worksheets for reinforcing understanding of numbers 11–20.

When needed, they used the Penguin Counters to solve the problems.

In addition to all of the above, we also looked at our globe and atlas to see just where Antarctica is. We talked about why it is so cold, because it is so far away from the equator and the sun! We talked briefly about the North Pole and the different animals who live there. We also began reading Mr. Popper’s Penguins, which is one of Jack’s all-time favorite books. We have a few more here we plan to read and some on hold at the library.

After our snack and science time with March of the Penguins, we came back to do some more table work. In the following photos, the children are using Ave*ry 10-pocket business card page protectors. I put the Penguin Flashcards 6–10 and 16–20 in two page protectors (one for each student), but I mixed them up. I explained I wanted them to rearrange them in order from least to greatest starting in the top left pocket.

After they completed that task, I gave them the Ten Frame Cards and asked them to match those to the corresponding number. They are new to ten frames, but they did so well with this! They loved it when I pointed out the patterning you can see with the ten frames in correct order.

While the above cards were made with our beloved 10-pocket page protectors in mind, you can certainly use them effectively without the protectors. I found ours at Wally World, and they have held up well for more than 6 months. In addition to the bolded items above, my Penguins Math Unit includes 2 Journal Pages with picture boxes, an Interactive Math Storybook and a Suggested Resources page too!

As mentioned, this resource is part of a blog hop linky party at Ribbons, Recipes and Rhymes!

I’m also linking up today’s post to love2learn2day’s Math Monday Blog Hop!

Psst … don’t forget: first person to comment and ask … I’ll send you a free copy of the entire Page Protector Printables: Penguin Math Unit. 😉 For others stopping by, I have this resource on sale for a limited time! 😉

Hope your day has been as icy (it really is spitting freezing rain here!) and fun!