Chapel Hill Snippets: After Christmas? Penguin time!

I don't know how many of you will be writing lesson plans and planning units right now---it's vacation time!!!! I'm headed for a pleasant time with extended family in Brevard, NC in the morning. No wifi there, however, so I thought I would post this in the internet world, so that after your vacation ends, you might have an additional idea of what to do with the kids. Coming back after the holidays is sometimes hard!

This is not a totally complete unit. I like to have a printable book with pictures that have already been adapted with icons. I do have a wonderful printable book but no icons---if you have boardmaker and need that, go through the book, and find one key element per page. The book is entitled 'Penguins, Penguins' and is not mine. Some other creative person made it, but I grabbed it off of Tarheel Reader here and have added it to my

Google docs HERE. The language and concepts are simple.

The photos are beautiful!

Why penguins? A couple of the classrooms of children I work with are going to be learning about them. I thought I would do my part---there is lots of language to learn, depending on my students' goals. My kids range from nonverbal to speaking in complex sentences.

screenshot from Tarheel Reader of the printable book

I had some children make paper bag penguin puppets right before the break, just to see how it would go. You may know that making paper bag puppets is a Joint Action Routine, and is described in an earlier post. For this puppet, you will need to pre-cut the pieces unless your children have good fine motor skills, and you have time. For my little group, I cut everything out, so they only had to glue. They loved the puppets! I found the idea here along with some other teaching ideas about penguins. No exact pattern was provided in the post I read, but it was not hard to figure out.