All About the Polar Bear

We've been working hard on our study of animals this week! The kids were especially interested in polar bears, so we learned a bit about them today.

They wanted to know how polar bears hunt. I found an excellent clip from an Planet Earth-type documentary of a polar bear hunting a seal. Since the seals can hear the vibrations of the cracking ice as the polar bears walk across it, the bears have to be perfectly still. The seals make breathing holes in the ice, and the bears pick a hole and sit down beside it. When a seal comes up for breath in that hole, the polar bear is waiting and grabs it for lunch! Of course, in the clip I found, the polar bear chose the wrong hole, so he didn't get the seal. The kiddos were super excited about this whole process. They actually started shushing each other as they watched the clip - they didn't want to miss out on anything! Go ahead and ask them about it! I'd be interested to hear how much of it they remember.

We've been journaling this week. Instead of free-choice journaling, I've been giving the children a prompt to help guide their thinking. Not all the children have been choosing to answer my prompt, but most have. Their journal entries are completely different! I'm loving the changes! So far this week, the children have written about their pets (or their grandparents' pets or a pet they'd like to have) and about their favorite animals. I cannot wait to show you these entries at our next conferences!

I've been working hard to help the children build their letter recognition skills this week. Many parents mentioned this was an area of concern during conferences, so I've been adding in different activities to build on this skill. Here's a few examples:

 Letter and Letter Sound Bingo

Alphabet Train Puzzle

I know not all children have a letter recognition goal, so I've been working in letter/sound connections and rhyming activities too. 

We were lucky enough this morning to have Ellie's baby brother, Kyle, come visit! The children enjoyed learning about what Kyle likes to do and watching Ellie try to get him to smile. Thank you, Allison, for bringing him in! It's always fun to have a living person for show-and-tell!