Penguins!

This is definitely one of our favorite "cooking projects" all year! I save a bit of our extra Halloween candy and then all we need is an Oreo. Sometimes we use extra candy corn for the feet, but I didn't have enough this year so we used Starburst candy cut in half.  I think that looks even cuter!

We try to make special snacks once a week.  Usually it coordinates with our letter of the week or a thematic unit.  I print up "recipes" to help build literacy skills.

As part of our penguin unit, we make "shape penguins".  When I do crafts in my classroom, I like to make sure they have some meaning beyond just creating something cute.  As the children build their penguins, we review the names of the shapes which makes it a Math lesson as well as an art project.

We read several nonfiction books about penguins as part of this unit, so the children learn quite a lot of information about these polar animals! 

After the shape penguins dry, I have each child dictate a fact about penguins and I attach it to their artwork. 

A few other things that we did this week to build Math skills were counting mats with penguin shaped erasers (from the Target dollar spot! I use these same mats with different shaped erasers to coordinate with our themes) and beginning addition mats that I made with stickers (also from the Target dollar spot!)  The addition sheets are laminated and work well with dry erase markers, but I made little laminated number squares so that the children could focus on the number rather than on forming the numeral (which really isn't developmentally appropriate for the age that I teach).

A few of our other penguin activities included building a floor puzzle that I got from Scholastic and polar animals with ice blocks in our sensory bin.