Fun Penguin Activities

After returning from Christmas break, many kindergarten teachers start their Winter themed units, such as snowman lessons and penguin activities. Are you a kindergarten teacher looking for fun penguin activities? If so, I’ve got what you need. Let’s take a look at a penguin themed box of fun, and penguin poems for kids.

Kindergarten Crate about Penguins

When this kindergarten subscription box arrives at my door each month, I can’t wait to see all the goodies inside. This month, I get to share with you all of these January activities, because they are all about penguins! Read on to see the video my daughter and I made to share the goodies with you.

Tacky and the Winter Games: A Penguin Book for Kids

In this adorable penguin book for kids, Tacky reminds us of the joy and excitement drives athletes to their great achievements. This book, along with the following activities, are included in the January Kindergarten Crate box. You can also grab the Tacky book on amazon, here.

If you are looking for books about Winter, check out my post, 25 Winter Books for Kids under $15.

Penguin Directed Drawing

Your kiddos will love this penguin art activity! For them, they get to learn how to draw penguins. For you, however, this fun penguin art project is more about building their listening skills, spatial awareness, visual discrimination, and fine motor skills.

The penguin directed drawing sheets included in your kindergarten crate, have step-by-step visual directions along the top for extra support! Let’s say, for example, you give the direction to “draw a triangle under the eyes”, but there is a kiddo who’s still working on drawing the eyes. Rather than having to repeat yourself over and over again, that kiddo can look at the visual steps to understand what he/she needs to do next.

When done completing their penguin drawing, they complete the sentence, “Tacky loves to…”, in response to the book.

This activity supports the ELA-Literacy common core standard, W.K.3 – Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events.

Magnetic Penguin Food Find

If you have sensory bins in your preK or kindergarten classroom, this is a fun penguin science activity. Using the magnetic wands, magnetic chips, and paper cut-outs, your kiddos will help the penguins find their food! Promote their sense of creativity, and have them pretend to be penguins searching for food.

To extend this lesson, also suggested in the kindergarten crate penguin activities, you can write letters on the penguin food cut-outs. This way, the sensory-based learning is taken a step further, and builds letter recognition. Want to incorporate penguin math, write numbers on the food. They can practice number recognition, or do simple addition as they collect two pieces of food at a time.

This activity supports common core standards for science, math, and literacy – using a model to represent the relationship between the needs of animals and the places they live, recognizing all upper and lowercase letters, and number recognition.

Penguin Game CVC Skiing

This CVC penguin game (included in the Kindergarten Crate) is perfect for small groups! Using the spinner, magnetic wands, chips, penguin mini erasers, dry-erase markers, and CVC mat, students will practice reading and writing cvc words.

As students isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds in the CVC words, they are working on the ELA-Literacy common core standard, RF.K.2.

Grab your free CVC Worksheet packet, HERE.

Penguin Math Game: Race to 20

Yes, Kindergarten Crate thinks of it all! They have also included this Race to 20 Penguin math game for your kiddos to play in small groups of 4. Each student gets a game board, takes turns spinning, and placing that many penguin mini-eraser on their game board. The first student to fill their game board is the winner!

$penguin-activities-math-game$

Race to 20 helps the kiddos count forward beginning from a given number (K.CC.A.2), understand the last number name said tells the number of objects counted (K.CC.B.4B), count to answer “how many” (K.CC.B.5), and identify whether the number of objects in one group is greater than, less than, or equal to another group (K.CC.C.6).

Winter Snowball Fun

Write letters, words, or numbers on a paper snowball, and have a snowball fight with your class! After everyone throws a snowball somewhere in the room, freeze, then on your cue have students walk around, and read the snowball they find. This, too, is included in your Kindergarten Crate teacher subscription box, but you can easily come up with your own. All you need is paper and writing utensils!

HURRY and get your January Kindergarten Crate so you can start these fun penguin activities soon!

Enter the code CORNER to get 10% off your first box!

Penguin Poem for Kids

As teachers, we demonstrate a love for learning every time we step foot into our classroom. Kids, however, need something extra to grab their attention. Especially now a days, they are counting more and more on videos, games, and apps to read to them, rather than learning how to read themselves. To get kids excited about reading, I use poetry!

If you, too, want to use poetry to get kids excited to read, I have a FREE poetry guide that you will love! It includes a weekly schedule, printables, and suggested resources to get started with a poem of the week plan. Grab your free guide, here!

Did you see my daughter and I singing the poem in the video? In cased you scrolled right past the link, you can watch our YouTube video, here.

This penguin poem for kids, I’m a Little Penguin, is perfect for singing, chanting, and leads to teaching more facts about penguins.

After teaching them the poem, you will catch them singing it over and over again – perfect for building language skills. To keep the excitement going, set up this Penguin Build-a-Poem. I love using a pocket chart, but you can have them sequence the word cards on the floor, or at a large table space.

Are you searching for penguin facts for kids to teach your kindergarten and first grade students all about penguins? You may have read my other post about penguin facts for kids. If so, you know this penguins writing center is a fun activity to fulfill your science and writing common core standards.