Russell Ramblings: Elephants & Penguins

Our household has been busy with our new litter of mini schnauzer puppies, but we still have had time to get our homeschool studies completed.  We finished up our elephant unit by making an elephant paper bag puppet.

The elephant puppets are lying on a spider web made by AJ.  AJ loves to make things, and I needed a spider web to go along with the song "One Elephant Went Out to Play."  (This must be one of the strangest songs ever, but it is catchy.)  We used the web and the puppets to play and dance along with the song, and they had "such enormous fun," as the song says.

Following elephants, we moved onto penguins. (We are fousing on wild animals for several units.)  I must confess I wasn't overly excited about this unit on penguins, but it has turned out to be one of the best yet!  We have had a great time learning about a father emperor penguin's commitment to his chick (and the mother's, too, but the father's is truly remarkable).  The lesson to go along with the penguin is to show love to everyone, but especially those in our family (as the father emperor penguin does).  We discussed how our daddy shows care for us and painted penguin cards for daddy.

I was pleased with how their cards turned out.  Even MJ (above) had fun joining in the mess.  But even better than their paint job was all the things they came up to write inside about how Daddy cares for them.  

The other exciting part of this unit was a mini-study on icebergs.  We made icebergs by freezing water in quart and gallon ziploc bags in irregular shapes.  We just plopped them all in 9x13 pan close together.  The next day we floated them in the bath tub and dicussed what icebergs are, how they form, and how they are dangerous to ships.  The picture didn't turn out to well, but here we are floating our icebergs.

There's been lots of "playing penguin" around our house with belly sliding across the kitchen floor, leopard seals chasing unhappy penguin brothers, etc.  The dusting of snow we received last night into today gave us even more of a penguin-y feel as we wrapped up our unit.

Looking ahead to next week, I haven't decided yet when our official "Christmas break" begins, but we'll take a few days off.

​Thanks for stopping by!

This post is linked to the weekly wrap-up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.