Wintery Science Activites

Well, I'm home today for a snow day. It has been a weird week of weather. Tuesday and Wednesday we were out for flooding. Then Thursday we got out an hour early. Snow was pouring by the time I got home and the road to my house was already covered. It was so beautiful. But today the sun is shining thankfully. We haven't had sun in over a week. And the snow is melting. I had plans of teaching all about MLK jr. this past week. But with no school, it just didn't happen. It think I'm going to have to let go of some of the activities though. Friday we have to have our science fair projects completed. Every grade level in my K-8 to school participates in Science fair. In kindergarten and first grade, we do a class project. And I haven't even started on ours yet. My plan for this year was to do the Crisco blubber project. I think I did it last time I was in First grade. But this year, I plan to add a research component for my kids with it.
So I wrote this on Friday and never got around to finishing it. I was busy this weekend with a fundraiser for the student at my school who was recently diagnosed with cancer. It was amazing to get to talk to people about him and to hear others stories about their experiences with cancer. We got to meet this 5 year old boy who had beat liver cancer. He was so cute showing us his scar and he told us that Jesus healed him. It was so cool. I had to really struggle not to cry when he was telling us his story. Anyway,. I took a little break from blogging and such this past weekend.
Today we started talking about polar animals and the arctic to get ready for our science fair project.I had seen this idea on someone's blog. (I can't find it again. I had thought it was The Teacher's Cauldron or Tunstell's Teaching Tidbits but I couldn't find it on either one) where you put pictures around the room with paper and let the students look at the pictures and then add their questions and ideas. So I googled some images on Arctic animals and got this set up.

I put pictures of different polar animals and then a couple of scenery pictures. The kids walked around the room and looked at them and then I let them sit at each table for about 3 minutes and add their thoughts and questions.

After they wrote their questions and ideas, we read them over and dismissed some errors to their thinking. Like that polar bears are nice. Then we made a circle map of the Arctic on the promethean board.

We also read a book about the North Pole, South Pole.

This gave us some new information. My plan had been to add some more to our chart but when we finished the book it was lunch time and we had to move on to other things. So tomorrow, we're going to add to our chart and do some writing about polar animals. This is our research for our science fair project. I have a couple of great packs from some of my blogging friends that are going to help with our research. The first is from Jennifer Kadar at Simply Kinder.

The second is from Maggie at Maggie's Kinder Corner. She has a pretty cool unit about Animals and Plants in Winter. You can check it out here.

Both of these items will help with our research and our presentation about the animals. I'll be back later this week to tell you more about our science.