Arctic animals and health/safety month

It's been a fun and busy month so far. We have been working on lots of things and I have been doing a lot of testing for Parent/Teacher conferences. But through it all we have of course enjoyed ourselves too. We have a field trip this week to The Bean Museum and will be seeing their live reptile show. I am excited to go. This month we have been focusing on Health and Safety as well as learning about some Arctic animals and their survival skills in the cold bitter months.

We talked about the Emperor Penguin and how the father penguins hold onto the egg while the mothers go to get food. The father has to make sure not to drop the egg and have it sit on the ice for too long or else the egg would crack and the baby would die. After the baby penguin is born it is also important for him to hold the baby between his legs to keep the baby warm and able to survive. We watched a video to show the kids how this exactly works. I was so excited to use my new apple TV so I didn't have to show the video on my laptop. Instead we watched it on a much bigger screen. The link is below.

Penguin Dads

Afterwards we did an activity that we did last year. I have rolled up socks that the kids get to pretend to be the father penguin caring for his egg. They have to waddle around holding the egg between their ankles. If it falls out they have to quickly pick it up with only their feet.

We also made these cute little penguins for art that day. 

For Health and Safety so far this month we talked about the Food Pyramid one day. I made a picture of the food pyramid and then had a bunch of different foods in a box. Each child got to use my little shopping cart to go shopping for some food. They then brought the food they picked up to the chart and told me which food group it belonged in. They really liked doing this. We had talked before they went shopping about how important it is to eat all sorts of food and to not eat a lot of junk food. I was surprised that they all wanted to pick healthy food when they went shopping. No one would pick out the donuts, cake and other junk food. Hopefully they eat that healthy at home :) Afterwards we played food bingo and then made some juice using my juicer. The juice had apples, oranges and carrots in it. I always find it funny that they think it will taste gross to have carrots in their juice and then end up loving it. They all looked so cute with little orange mustaches. Too bad I didn't get a picture of them.

On a different day we talked about emergencies and made a list of things that were emergencies and what isn't an emergency. I found a news clip of a little girl who was able to save her mother during a seizure by calling 911. The kids thought this was so neat that they could call the police to help them if someone was in trouble and needed help. 

Girl saves mom video

Afterwards we each took turns practicing dialing 911 on a toy phone and then made our own little phone to practice learning our home phone number. I laminated each phone so they could keep practicing at home with their parents.