The Life of a Running Momma: Weekly Learning Theme: Polar Animals

Jeremy Update:

Jeremy was moved to an acute care facility today. I didn't get the chance to visit him today but I am pleased this new facility will have visiting hours that will be more conducive to me going after Ty gets off work. In the ICU visitors weren't allowed from 6pm-9pm which was pretty much the only time I could go unless one of my parents was able to come watch the kids for me to go. Now visitors are allowed from 8-9pm. I could get both the kids to bed and then go up to visit. We are all a bit anxious about the change since nurses and nurse's assistants will be working with him and they don't have the technology and equipment that the ICU had. They now take his temperature under his arm and his trach tube is set up differently to where the secretions he coughs out land on his chest. It will take some getting used to the difference in care that he will be receiving at the new facility. I'm anxious to get out there to see what it is like. Mom and dad said Jeremy was more responsive today, back to what he was like on Saturday. Carter talked to Jeremy on my mom's phone and they said Jeremy seemed to really enjoy that. The nurse today said Jeremy was probably really tired yesterday and that was why he was less responsive. I know there will be good days and bad days and we are all prepared for that. Now on to our most recent learning theme...

It is so much fun that Carter has gotten to an age where he has opinions and ideas and can make decisions. For our learning theme after colors I listed off different learning theme topics we could study and asked him what he wanted to learn about next. He very excitedly chose polar animals which works quite perfectly since it is currently winter. It is so much fun to give him more ownership over his learning. I would have done Arctic animals, but I really wanted to throw penguins into the mix so I broadened the theme out to polar animals.

Listed below are the objectives I am focusing on for the themed weeks. I have updated our objectives a second time because I felt like we were ready to focus on something new. I plan to continue to implement activities to practice and reinforce our previous objectives while putting more emphasis on our new objectives. Some of them won't necessarily be targeted with specific activities during our weeks, but I wanted to list them to help me remember to practice them continually. The highlighted objectives are ones Carter received exposure to during our theme this week:

Continue to improve fine motor skills and drawing (specifically I'm looking for him to be able to copy a circle and a square as well as draw a person with 2-4 body parts).

Understand same and different.
Accurately tell stories as well as retell the story from a book.

Use age appropriate scissors.
Develop a better understanding of time (for example, be able to describe when things happen using morning, afternoon, night)

Group objects based on a category (sort by defining feature).

Count and understand what the numbers mean.

Activities/Movement:

To start the week off I put together a sensory bin for Carter. He loves rice and hasn't had a sensory bin with rice in quite a while so I used rice as the snow and threw in some cotton balls for ice chunks. Then I put some shredded blue paper to the side to make water. We found some arctic animals in a tube at Michael's and put them in for him to play with along with plastic cups to make igloos and ice towers. I was impressed with how well Carter did with the rice this time. He made sure to keep it in the container and when he accidentally pushed some out, he was quick to help me clean it up. Something Carter really enjoyed doing was picking up rice and "making it snow" down on the animals. Carter really liked for me to be the mommy polar bear while he was the baby polar bear.

Carter played a lot in the sensory bin, just pretending to be animals and having fun. We also used it for learning activities. First we sorted the animals into the water or on the snow to show where they lived. Some of the animals we put beside the water because they live mostly on land, but spend a lot of time in water. Once we had them sorted, we counted them and compared the animals to see how they were alike and different. We noticed most of the animals that live in the water or spend a lot of time in the water were black and white whereas the animals who live on the land tended to be all white. Carter wondered why so we talked about camouflage and how it helps to protect animals.

Ty was sweet enough to search for my large laminated Scholastic News copies. I pulled out the polar bear and penguin ones and read them with Carter. The magazines are great because they have big pictures of the animals with labels and descriptions. The polar bear magazine had a graph on the back so Carter and I worked together to fill it in using miniature post-it notes. He would count the animals, find the picture of the animal of the graph, and add the correct number of sticky notes by the animal. When we were done we compared the bars of the graph, talking about which animal had the most boxes filled in and which had the least. Elise enjoyed looking at the pictures in the magazines and crawling over them since they were laminated and slick. She also liked the noise they made as she crawled across.

Looking at the large picture of the polar bear with labels.

Filling in the graph for the arctic animals shown in the picture.

Looking at the graph and comparing the bars.

Elise crawling across a Scholastic News.

As we read books and did activities with polar animals, we made a list of the polar animals we learned about. Once we had quite a few animals on the list, I found pictures online and printed them off. Then I showed the pictures to Carter and we talked about the name of the animal in each picture. I had the name of each animal written on a sentence strip. I helped Carter match the animal to it's name by helping him listen for the beginning sound of the animal's name and finding the word that started with that letter. He enjoyed the activity at first but we had written down a few too many animal names. I should have condensed the list down to animals he knew a little bit better. The musk ox was a far reach, he kept thinking it was a caribou. But then that gave us the opportunity to look at the caribou and musk ox, talking about how they were the same and how they were different.

Using the animal pictures from our sorting activity I created a book for Carter and Elise. I like to create really easy readers that would be considered A/B readers using the guided reading leveling system. They have the same sentence structure on each page with just one word changing that can be figured out using the picture. I also like to pick a word from the kindergarten or first grade sight word list to be in the sentence so the kids will see and hear it repeated on each page and have extra practice with it. In this book the sentence was "The _____ lives where it is cold." Where was the sight word I wanted to highlight in this book. I used sandwich bags to make the book which Elise enjoys because they make crinkly noises. When I read the book to Elise I pulled the animal toys out of the sensory bin to show her as we read. She enjoyed playing with them and, of course, shoving them in her mouth!

Carter reading the polar animal book while I dressed Elise.

Playing with the beluga whale while we read the page about the beluga whale.

Playing with the seal while we read the page about the seal.
When Carter was reading the book I wrote he was making up really great words with a lot of great information about the animals. I asked him if he wanted to write his own book and he said he did, I think mostly because he wanted to use the stapler when he finished! Naturally he didn't dictate as detailed of a book as he had been telling earlier, but I think his writer slowed him down! I cracked up when we got to the lynx because we really haven't read much about them and he quickly decided to write, "Happy birthday, lynx." That turned out to be my favorite page of the book.

I wanted to show Carter different kinds of penguins so we could talk about how they looked the same and how they looked different. I planned to find pictures on the internet and print them but I lucked out when the book Frozen Wild by Jim Arnosky had a page showing different kids of penguins. Instead of printing pictures we just looked at the penguins in the book and talked about them. Carter pointed out all the penguins were black and white. Some were different sizes and some had colors other than just black and white.

Using the animal figurines from Carter's sensory bin we made animal tracks in snow (white Play Doh). Before we got started we sorted the animals into 2 piles: ones that would make tracks in snow and ones that wouldn't, such as orca whales and beluga whales. I was impressed when Carter set the whales to the side saying they wouldn't make tracks in snow because they live in water. As Carter made tracks in the snow we talked about how the tracks looked the same and how they looked different. Then Carter wanted to draw animal tracks on paper because he'd seen the cards I made. So he laid the animals down on paper and attempted to trace them onto the paper. Then he drew a large circle with smaller circles around it to draw a print.

Sorting the animals based on whether they would make tracks or not.
The book Who Am I? Snowy Animals showed snow tracks belonging to some of the animals. I pointed them out when we read the book and we talked about what they looked like a little bit. Then I had small cards that I drew the prints onto. We sorted the tracks into footprints with toes and without toes. Then we talked about how the tracks in each pile were the same and how they were different. Carter really enjoyed counting to see how many toes a polar bear has compared to a husky dog. I know a husky dog isn't a polar animal, but it was in the books so I used it anyway.

One Scholastic News I had about penguins had a large photo of a penguin with labels. I pulled it out and put it next to the large photo of the polar bear with labels. We talked about the animals and described how they were the same and different. I was impressed when Carter pointed out they both had claws to help them walk on the ice. He not only used the picture, but also used background knowledge he had from reading books about the animals which said penguins have claws to help them walk on ice. I didn't tell him that polar bears mostly have claws to eat other animals.
I measured out string to represent the sizes of different penguins. Carter used scissors to help me cut the string. Then we laid the strings out and Carter pointed out which penguin was the tallest and which was the shortest. I wrote the penguin names on masking tape and attached it to the string so we would know which penguin the string stood for. Then we compared the penguin sizes to Carter by holding them up next to him and he was excited to discover he was taller than all of the penguins except the emperor penguin.

Craft:

It had been a while, like a month, since we'd done a handprint or footprint craft so I had to get one in during this learning them! We did a really simple penguin footprint by using black fingerpaint and drawing a belly on so it looked like the side of a penguin. They turned out really cute! Then to make a background we used blue paper and Carter ripped and cut white paper and glued it to the bottom for snow. He, surprisingly enough, wasn't interested in gluing. He wanted to rip and cut the paper and then have me glue the pieces down for him so I did.

Carter gluing the beaks and eyes onto the penguins.

Cutting paper for the snow.

Our finished penguins.

We got in some extra practice drawing circles by drawing penguins. I showed Carter how to draw an oval body and add a circle head. Then we added ovals on either side for their flippers. Carter is great at drawing ovals and circles. He had a hard time drawing the head and body different sizes. He was really proud of his penguin and I thought he did a great job!

Drawing the penguin's head and body.

Make Believe:

We read the book Who Am I? Snowy Animals and pretended to be the different animals by acting out the movements listed in the book. My favorite was watching Carter slide around on his belly like a seal.

Carter pretending to be a seal.
As we read books about animals in the cold, we made notes about how different animals keep warm. Then we pretended to be different animals by doing what they do to stay warm. We made a den, we huddled together like penguins, and we put blankets on top of us pretending it was extra fur. That ended up being Carter's favorite game of the week. His favorite was to cuddle together for warmth and then throw a blanket on top of us as extra fur.

Adding a layer of fur to his body to keep warm.

In the backyard we pretended we were going on a polar bear hunt. Harper was the polar bear and I used the words of the book We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury just by changing them to make sense for polar bears. For example:

We're going on a polar bear hunt.

We're going to catch a big one.

What a beautiful day!

We're not scared.

Oh-oh! Ice!

Thick, slippery ice.

We can't go over it.

We can't go under it.

Oh, no!

We've got to go through it.

Slide, swish!

(We pretended like we were skating on ice as we went along.)

After a while Carter wanted to ride in the wagon to hunt the polar bear.

Songs:

I made up a song about orca whales to the tune of I'm a Little Teapot and we sang it a few different time. It goes like this:

I'm a big orca whale,

black and white.

I have a blow hole,

on my top side.

When I need to breathe,

I pop on up.

And blow some water to the sun!

We also sang Five Little Penguins which I made up based off Five Little Ducks and acted it out with Carter's penguin cheddar crackers.

Five Little Penguins went out one day,

Over the ice and far away.

Mother penguin said,

Waddle, waddle, waddle,

But only 4 of her 5 little penguins came back. (And so on)

It was fun to incorporate one of Carter's favorite songs, Baby Beluga by Raffi.

We sang the Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear song with the words changed to Polar Bear, Polar Bear. I couldn't find a youtube video of the Teddy Bear song that I liked, but this video will give you an idea of what the lyrics are.

Special Snack:

I was having a really hard time coming up with a special snack to go with this theme. When we go grocery shopping if Carter is well behaved he gets to choose a special snack for the week. He typically chooses a fruit, yogurt, or string cheese. When we were walking down the aisle to pick up saltines he saw Goldfish and wanted some. Then he saw penguin cheddar crackers that were basically just Goldfish shaped like penguins and he wanted them. It worked perfectly with our theme! Score one for the team!

Field Trip/Interactive Experience:

We took a trip to the zoo and started at the Life in the Cold exhibit. Carter was excited to see the snowy owls and arctic foxes. He pointed out that the arctic foxes were white because it's winter and they will be brown later. It was cute to see him get excited to see animals we had been talking about throughout the week.

Carter looking at the arctic foxes.

Checking out the snowy owls.