Walruses & Groundhogs…It Was That Kind of Week :)

It was a busy week in Kindergarten, so I won’t stall any longer :)  Here’s a look at what we were up to this week!

We were knee deep learning about all things Arctic…animals, that is!  My kids were SO into it.  It was really quite precious, actually.  I can honestly say that I’m pretty sure they’re *obsessed* with walruses.  They couldn’t get enough!!!!  We started out our learning with a little tree map to organize our thinking.  After we did a little research and gathered lots of info about these 2 ton mammals, we transferred all of our knowledge into writing.  As important as it is to write about things from the heart, it’s equally important that we become great non-fiction writers as well! And my kids couldn’t.get.enough.  They kept all their writing in a little “research folder” and we’ll be organizing all of our work into a little “All About Walruses” non-fiction book to send home next week.  Whew!  Here are just a few little samples.

Top:  Walruses have flippers and tusks.  They also have blubber.

Bottom:  The tusks help them pull themselves out of the water.

Deanna Jump has an AWESOME Arctic Animals unit that I used for all of our Arctic animal learning this week.  Love EVERYTHING about it!!!  Speaking of walruses, did you know they can whistle?!  My kids were FASCINATED by this fact!!!!  I even found this adorable little 2 minute clip online that showed a walrus whistling and barking!  SO cool!  We did a fun little graph and surveyed our friends to find out how many of us can whistle. It turns out that 7 of our friends are quite the little music makers! We carried on our whistling conversation into a little writing/art activity and as always, smart before art!  We compared ourselves to other things/people that can/can’t whistle and wrote about it!  Then the kids drew themselves whistling.  If they couldn’t whistle, they drew a little red “x” over their whistles…too cute!

“I can whistle and a walrus can, too.”

“I cannot whistle and Caleb can’t whistle either.”

To carry our arctic fun into math, we did a fun little addition activity that we called, “Feed the Walrus”.

I drew this little walrus, cut a hole in his mouth, and then mounted him on the side of a copy paper box.  I grabbed a little tray and drew a couple of tens frames on them {with an expo}, used a couple of jumbo dice, and found these little sea life counters I had in my stash of random math manipulatives {gotta LOVE the Dollar Tree!}

We’ve been talking a lot about “digits”.  I explained to the kids how we have one/two/three digit numbers and for this game, we were going to see how many two digit numbers we could create with number sentences.  First up, I had one friend roll the dice.  We practiced “counting up” from the highest amount rolled and then fed the walrus that number of sea creatures. 

After the first friend rolled the dice and fed the walrus, my next friend came up, rolled the dice, and fed the walrus the next amount.

After the walrus had a full belly {two rolls of the dice}, we pulled out the “food” and used the tens frame tray to count the total amount.

Then we created number sentences to go with them!  This was a great little learning piece because the kids got to see how different number sentences can still equal the same amount.  For example…8+7=15 and so does 10+5.  They are seriously little pros when it comes to working with tens frames! 

After everyone had a turn to roll and write, we counted up the two digit numbers for a quick vocabulary review.  We had more number sentences with two digit sums than not!  Pretty cool!!

I can’t remember the last time when I didn’t get to celebrate Groundhog Day ON February 2nd.  In all honesty, I sorta forgot about it this year!!  And with my kids being SO excited about Arctic animals, our sweet little burrowing friends just took a backseat this year.  But that doesn’t mean we didn’t talk about it!  Two of my sweet school babies celebrate their birthdays on February 2nd, so we couldn’t skip this tradition altogether!  I read a couple of my favorite books…

And we did a little compare/contrast activity.  We’re still working on making connections, so we did a little text to self connection writing craftivity after reading the book, “Wake Up, Groundhog!”.  Ohmiword….too stinkin’ cute!!!

When I wake up…

     “I want to go back to sleep.”              “I feel tired and I want to go to bed.”           “I am sleepy and I have to go to school.”

SO darn cute!!  And boy was it ever easy for them to make a connection!!  HA!!!  Of course, I had to write my own…

“When I wake up, I hit the snooze button about 5 times before walking to the Keurig half asleep to make my morning cup of coffee.” 

Okay, so I didn’t share that with my kids, but it was pretty darn easy for me to make a connection, too!!  HA!!! 

Incase you’re looking for some more groundhog ideas for NEXT year, you can read about what I did with my class HERE and HERE.

I think it’s safe to say that I’ll burrow in my bed an extra long time tomorrow morning and cross my fingers that our sweet little groundhog will infact NOT see his shadow!!!