Penguins

Last year I was on maternity leave in the months of February and March, therefore I didn't get to teach my penguin unit. Let me tell you, I missed out! This was by far my favorite two weeks of teaching. I decided to approach it in a project based learning way, and going into it I was terrified. As a teacher that values structure, order, planning, etc., it was hard for me to let go of the reins and allow kindergartners to learn in a PBL setting. However, watching them work together, hearing their discussions, and seeing their results made it ALL worth it. I was never so proud of them before!

We spent the first week reading nonfiction texts, writing down our thoughts on anchor charts, learning new vocabulary, and writing about our learning. Here are a few pictures and links of resources that we used.

After reading two texts, the kids generated this "are, can, have" anchor chart. 

A fun activity to do was this "What do you think?" activity. Besides the fact that kindergartners LOVE writing on the board, they loved it even more when their answers were right! Find this activity HERE for free on TPT.

I created a cover for our Penguin Portfolios and then we glued them to a folded 18x12 paper (I think that's the sizing.) The students loved being able to store all of their information in this portfolio. They said that they felt like experts! :) We then used the words from our anchor chart- "are, can, and have" to write about penguins. HERE is the link we used to do this.

The next week was spent researching a specific species of penguins. I split the kids into groups of three and created a list of facts about their species of penguins. My visions for this week of PBL on Penguins came from this TPT packet HERE. It has everything you could ever need. Here are a few pictures from this week.

Students used the information I gave them to fill in their graphic organizers as a group. They took turns writing. I made sure to have one or two strong readers in the group.

After reading and writing about their species, they had to create a giant penguin with the features of their penguin.

Here are a few of the finished products. They are SO cute! :)

I hope you enjoyed reading about our two weeks of penguins. It was so much fun!

~Alissa