Staying warm like a penguin...

Penguins are cool little birds! We have learned so much about them while talking about polar animals. We have been cold lately due to the temperature dropping but it was nothing like what most penguins and other polar animals live in!!! We talked about things we do to stay warm. We started by reading the book, Sneezy the Snowman. It is a great story about a snowman that is trying to get warm but continues melting. The kids LOVED it. It was so funny and repetitive that it kept their attention and they were able to read with me. We made a snowman and did a writing activity to go along with it. They came up with some pretty good ways to get warm. We also learned how penguins stay warm in the ice and snow and FREEZING water. It's hard to understand unless you are there, sooooo we did our best to be penguins. The first thing we learned is that penguins like to huddle together to stay warm. We tried a huge huddle and it worked. We ended up very warm standing so close together. Next we talked about how they swim a lot. We learned that penguins have a special oil on their feathers that keeps the water off of them. This was a little difficult to understand so we kept a human hand and added a penguin flipper by coating our other hand in vasaline. It was cool watching the water bead up on our hand. The last way a penguin stays warm is it's blubber. We filled a container with cold water. We filled a large bag with lard and added a small bag inside the lard. Each child stuck his or her hand inside the bag and found that with the lard (or blubber in a penguin's case) surrounding our hand we  could not feel the cold water!!!