Up in the Arctic



Dear Mom,

What a "cool" week! We finished our unit on cold weather and snow by studying the Arctic habitat and its animals. We read non-fiction books about penguins and polar bears, learned new vocabulary words like predator and prey, fiction and non-fiction, and habitat and adaptation. It was fun to read Plenty of Penguins (non-fiction) and compare it to Penguins to the Rescue (fiction). The real tell in this was how the seals in the non-fiction book were treating the penguins like prey by trying to catch and eat them as they swam in the water, but in the fiction book, the seals were thanking the penguins (who were dressed in winter clothing!) for keeping their baby seal company until they could find her. :) Non-fiction books teach us facts, while fiction books are stories.

Some books are fiction, but still can teach us facts, like Polar Bear Night, which tells the story of a baby polar bear who leaves her mommy sleeping at night to pass by all of her Arctic animal neighbors (seals, walruses, whales, etc.) to watch a beautiful meteor shower in the night sky. Another example of this was Over in the Arctic: Where the Cold Winds Blow, a counting book that has a repeating line and introduced us to the fascinating animal mamas and babies that call the Arctic home, like snow geese and wolves. For each page, we swooped with owls, howled with wolves, whistled with whales and more by acting out what each mama animal told her babies to do. We learned a lot about which animals live in the Artic and a few facts about each in this book. the adaptations we saw were pretty neat too, like white fur that allows many Arctic animals to blend into the snow, or the fatty layer that many Arctic animals have to keep them warm.

Our art project was a finger painting and stamping activity to create an Artic scene with a snow cave and penguins! We all had fluffy cotton snowfall on our blue paper backgrounds and a few of us even create blizzards for our scenes. We're so creative. :)

 

Our special snacks this week (along with apples, raisins and celery sticks!) were Penguin Cookies (chocolate cookies with white chips) and penguin shaped cheese crackers.

 

We practiced our handwriting- both Dd from last week and Ee from

this week. Our coordination is improving greatly- Ee and Dd are both difficult letters for little hands to write because of the curves. We'll keep practicing all our letters in handwriting because soon we'll be sounding out and writing CVC words with all the letters we know! Ee was our letter of the week and the last vowel we had left to learn. Ee says his own name sometimes- just like Aa, Ii, Oo and Uu do. We are getting to be pros at recognizing our letters- and we're down to only a handful left to learn!

 For math, we focused on counting and subitizing. We played a Penguin Dice Game, where we rolled two dice, counted the dots to get a total and finding that number on our penguin game board. When we found the number, we crossed it out and rolled again. The first person to get all of the numbers on their game board crossed off won! This is a game we can play at home too, with just two dice and a blank paper that you write random numbers through 12 on. As I get older, we can try three dice too!

We focused a lot on color recognition this week. We worked on understanding that certain colors mean certain things in weather (blue skies usually mean sunny days, grey skies can mean rain, etc.) and differentiating between real and make believe color situations (blue elephants are make believe, while grey or brown ones are real). We used our pretend "Color Glasses" to find colors around the classroom as Ms. Marianne called them out. A new game came out called Go to the Rainbow. It's similar to Go Fish, but instead of matching numbers in our hands, we matched colored paint sample chips, so it helped us to recognize different shades of the colors we've been studying. There were so many different shades of each color and we had to pay close attention when someone asked if we had a red or blue or another color in our hands.

One of my favorite activities of the week was Captain Color! Ms. Marianne brought out a super hero cape that we wore and became Captain Color- a color hunting super hero! Using a funny, overly serious voice, she gave us a "mission"- a color that we had to "fly" to and point out for the rest of our friends. When everyone had had a turn, we took the game outside and we got to give each other "missions" based on what colors we saw outside. It was so fun!  It's great to out of our seats and move around while we learn. It helps us to learn faster and stay engaged in what we're doing.


 Next week. our letter will be Kk and our theme will be... In the Kitchen! We'll be working a lot in the kitchen at Ms. Marianne's house and doing things like following basic recipes, measuring ingredients, learning about kitchen tools, and discovering different food items we can find in kitchens. It'll be a yummy time for sure!

Love,
Your Child
and
Ms. Marianne