Brrrrrr! Chilling with Polar Bears

The last time I wrote about polar bears I found very few children's books to include in my post.  This time I found a LOT, and plenty of songs and rhymes too. 

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I absolutely fell in love with Sea Bear!  This beautiful new book couples stunning illustrations with some of the most poetic language you'll find - and it's simple enough for young children to understand and connect with.  It starts, 

"Polar bears are patient beasts, as patient as glaciers.  We know how to hope and how to wait.  I learned to be patient long ago from my polar bear mother - "

The story follows a polar bear as it paddles across open ocean, searching for ice or land to stand on.  As the journey goes on, you and your little ones will find yourself aching for land along with the polar bear.  Without ever mentioning conservation, this book absolutely lends itself to further conversation about it.  The text and illustrations show many other Arctic animals along the way, from orca and seals, to narwhal, walrus and sharks.  I cannot recommend it highly enough!

This book also provides a perfect lead in for talking about how polar bears are insulated against the cold by their blubber and fur.  Making a blubber glove to insulate little hands from ice water isn't difficult - and there are instructions for it in this previous post.

If you're reading to young children, you'll also love Polar Bears!  Like the other books in this series, it couples beautiful photographs with simple but meaningful text.  Each 2 page spread includes just 1 - 2 sentences about polar bears, which are closely tied to the photographs.  The close text and picture connection is perfect to support emergent readers as they retell or read the pages.  My teacher heart also appreciates the table of contents at the beginning, the labeled picture of a polar bear, and the vocabulary page in the back of the book.  I would absolutely use this book with preschool, kindergarten and first grade.

If you want a take home reader about polar bears, check out this craft and booklet I created.  Like Polar Bears (above), each page includes 1-2 simple sentences about polar bears, but with black and white line drawings it's suitable to make a copy for each child to have their own.  (The finished crafts also make a very impressive bulletin board!)

Polar Bear Night and the companion book  Polar Bear Morning are also lovely for young children!  Once again the text is simple and short, and the linocut pictures are easy to see from a short distance - important if you're using it for a story time with a big group.  These books also include other Arctic animals, which I think is important for helping children build their schema of the Arctic.  


I've written before about including tangram puzzles in my teaching, and of course I have a puzzle for polar bears!  This little sweetheart is part of my Polar Tangram set, which makes it easy to incorporate some math learning along with our polar fun.

All my tangram puzzles include the shape outline form so my youngest children can manipulate the shapes to match the picture, and a colorful picture version that offers far fewer clues.  I've used these with children aged 3 - 8 and their parents, and it's amazing how engaging and challenging they can be for all ages.

My kiddos also enjoyed Please Bring Balloons.  This lovely fantasy story isn't about polar bears per se, but features a beautiful carousel bear that comes to life and transports Emma to a carousel bear rumpus!  I think the only other children's book with a "rumpus" is Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and I can see turning on kid friendly music and having a rumpus of our own after reading this book.  This book also makes me want to get out polar bear shapes and a variety of craft materials for children to make their own carousel bears.

If you're like me, just reading about something isn't enough - you want to sing and dance and create and extend the learning, right?  I went looking and found some adorable songs and rhymes to share with you, and I have one of my own to share too. 

I wrote this little song a few years ago because so many children (and adults) don't realize that polar bears and penguins don't live in the same place.  Penguins live south of the equator, mostly in the Antarctic, and polar bears are north of the equator, in the Arctic.  Click on the picture to download a printable song page, or click here to hear me sing it on YouTube.com.

 I also found these on YouTube.com :

Here's Grizzly bears are big and brown (with verses about grizzlies, polar bears and teddy bears) from JBrary,
and
Rachel Rambach has an original song and motion rhyme Polar Bear.


For a polar bear variation on Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, check out the Johnson County Library blog, and check out Storytime Hooligans for a beautiful felt and rhyme.

I want to end today's post with a few more book recommendations.  I've focused on books I use for story times with young children, but there are many more lovely books out there!

 

 

Until next time,

Paula

Penguin Fun

 Do your students love penguins?  Winter is a great time to learn about penguins - and other polar animals!  Last week I shared some ideas for learning about polar bears, so this week I thought I'd blog about penguins.

A couple of years ago we were lucky enough to have a penguin exhibit at our local museum (Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.)  Most of the exhibition was photographs, but there was also a docent with this beautiful taxidermied penguin, so we were able to get up close and check it out.  It amazed us all to see how tiny its feathers were!

After walking through the photo exhibition and seeing pictures of penguins doing all the things penguins do, we noticed a lovely, long bench.  The children decided to practice tobboganing, which is just sliding on our bellies.  This is one of the ways penguins move across the ice!

Back at home we tried holding "eggs" on our feet, just like daddy penguins do all winter. We were inspired by the book Without You, by Sarah Weeks, pictured here along with some other fun penguin books:

Standing still was pretty easy, but when we tried to waddle with our "eggs" on our feet, they went rolling.  We decided we would not make good penguin daddies, that's a hard job!

We had fun making our own penguin rookery, complete with chicks sitting snug on the father penguins' feet.  I displayed them on a large sheet of polystyrene foam, and the mottled white background looked icy.  (I've recently updated this activity and added a non-fiction book, and made it available here.)

We also watched some awesome youtube.com videos about penguins.  These links will take you to some of our favorites!
Jack Hartman, penguin dance
Happy Feet brain break
The Learning Station, Penguin Song

We learned about the letter P the same week we learned about penguins, so we made some pink or purple lower case letters, and added some penguins to it.  The children got to choose how many little penguins they made for their letter, so we added a little math by making a graph about how many penguins we used.  Super simple, and totally relevant to the children - oh yeah, and it was a good reason to practice writing their names!

Here's another fun penguin activity that ties back into penguins sliding on the ice.  Freeze a tray of water a couple of days ahead of time (you want it frozen completely solid).  Sit a toy penguin on it, and see if it starts sliding.  If you have it laid flat, the penguin won't move unless you scoot it along.  Then slowly raise one end - I used stacks of dice - until your penguin goes sliding on the ice.  Experiment with the ramp you've created - what else slides?  How high do you need to prop the end?

You probably already know I love to use hand print art with the children each week too, so one of our choices was a hand print penguin - with a textured "snowy" background.  I mixed approximately half shaving cream and half white paint, and let the children finger paint that onto their paper (fun!), then we made the penguin separately, and glued it on once the background was dry.  The shaving cream/paint dried with texture and a lovely silky feel to it.  If you haven't tried this yet, you'll be amazed by the results!

For even more penguin ideas, check out this post and this post here on my blog.  If you're looking for resources you can download and print to help you teach your children about penguins, you can see what I've created here.

What are your favorite penguin activities?  I'd love to know!

Polar Bears

It seems to me that there are two great times to learn about polar animals: in the winter, when they come to mind along with snow and ice, and in the summer time, when the idea of cooling off sounds lovely.  We've done both, and either way, the children love it!

You surely know by now that children's books are a huge part of my planning and teaching!  I try to also include both fiction and non-fiction.  While it's more traditional to tell our little ones stories, I've found that they're very interested in learning how their world works, and find non-fiction fascinating too.

I love to make this cute polar bear craft with my youngest kiddos, but for my first graders I'd add the non-fiction booklet to it too.  Either way, these sure look cute for a display!

We love to do hands on activities!  Here we are, exploring the idea of the arctic ocean, using killer whales, seals, polar bears, Alaskan crabs and more.  Do you see the ice cubes in the second picture?  Some of our animals like to get out on the ice, and float along or rest for a bit.  (Some of our friends like to play with ice and water when it's hot outside too!)

We often make hand prints or foot prints to go along with our learning themes, and polar bears are no exception.  We even made narwhal prints, and watched an awesome video about narwhals!

Learning to read sight words is an important part of kindergarten and first grade,  so I made this sight word game for us to practice with.  (It includes cards for letter learners, and PP, P and 1st grade sight words, so it's pretty flexible. Who wouldn't want to help those baby bears get to their momma, right?

I've found a lot of children - and adults for that matter - don't realize that polar bears and penguins don't share the ice.  Polar bears live in the Arctic, near the north pole, and penguins (mostly) live in the Antarctic, near the south pole.  Here's a little song I wrote to help the children remember the difference: 

Download it free by clicking on the link or the picture!  If you have a map or globe in your classroom, have a child point to the correct location as you sing each verse.

While you're reading and singing the song, how about some more facts about polar bears and other arctic animals?  I laid them flat for a picture, but they work really well in a pocket chart (but pocket charts don't photograph well, with all the reflections off the plastic).

I like to use sentence to picture matching activities as a literacy center, and most of my students are really good about working with the materials.  Still, sometimes we need to show written work, or have some kind of accountability for the students, so they all come with follow up worksheets.  Here's one of them:

Another fun, hands on sensory activity to do is to build with ice cubes.  You can certainly use plain old regular ice cubes, chances are good that you have some on hand, or if not, you can buy a bag of ice at any grocery store or gas station.  I like to make over-sized ice cubes, using whatever empty containers are available and headed for the recycling bin.  It's amazing how much fun giant ice cubes are as a building tool, and they take a nice long time to melt too.

If you're building with ice cubes, you might also want to show the children a video of how an igloo is built!  I like this one.  After you watch this, be prepared to see a lot of building going on - and have some nice large blocks on hand.

We've also explored how polar bears thick layer of fat, or blubber, helps to insulate them - you can see that post here.

So what other activities do you like to do when you're learning about polar bears?  I'd love to know! 

Paula

P.S. Stop back by next week to see how we like to learn about penguins.

Polar learning fun

This week at the library we read and learned about polar animals.  We talked about how some arctic animals change from brown fur to white fur in the winter - for camouflage.  We learned that polar bears have black skin and that the hairs in their fur are hollow to help keep them warm on land.  We learned that they have a layer of blubber to keep them warm in the water.  We even pretended to be daddy emperor penguins with eggs and then chicks on our feet! (Check out the cute chicks we all got to use - no, they're not penguin chicks for real, but we sure had fun pretending to waddle with one balanced on our feet.)

After all our singing and dancing and reading was done, we had some awesome follow up activities to learn from play with!

You may have seen the "blubber" glove experiment: the one where a child puts their hand inside a rubber glove that has been covered with a layer of lard to insulate it.  They put their gloved hand in ice water, and the blubber glove stops them from feeling the cold, much as many polar animals have a thick layer of fat to insulate them.  We have big groups come to story time, 45-50 children, so we needed a quick and easy (and not too messy) way to do this activity.  Here's the solution:

I put one zippered plastic baggy inside of another, then spooned in a thick layer of lard between the baggies.  I taped the bags together, so little hands wouldn't end up in the lard (ew!).  The result was a clean, dry plastic bag nested inside a bag of lard, and it worked beautifully!

The children were fascinated, many of them coming back to this experience over and again, amazed that they couldn't feel the ice water.  Of course, there were also friends who wanted to stick their hands in the ice water and just enjoy that sensation - and that's okay too.

Another fun activity we offered this week was ice painting.  Ms. Kathleen made frozen paintsicles (yes, I can too make up words) and the children ran them over their papers to create beautiful masterpieces.  I noticed that a lot of the children looked off into space as they rubbed the paintsicles around, apparently enjoying the movement and the smooth feeling of the frozen paint gliding over their papers.  This little guy painted two handed!

 

... and some of our friends painted their two hands!

Watching this, we know that it's important for us to continue to provide sensory play experiences!

We also had out some shallow trays of water, which were mostly frozen.  Some of the children enjoyed the sensory experience of the ice and ice water, while others used them as we had envisioned, by propping one end, and seeing which objects would slide down the ice.  The children are constantly showing us that there are indeed many "right" ways to do things in this world!