Penguins Unit Study – The Afterschool House

Informational Text Features: Make A Penguin Labeling Activity…..

I’ve extended our informational text feature study with maps (or should I say penguins) another week. My little guy is intrigued with the maps we are using for locating penguins on a world map.

We’ve read a number of books with maps now. Here is his ultimate favorite…

We’ve read it a dozen times or more.

This book has a few maps in it. It has visuals in the GLOSSARY that include additional maps.

The best text feature was this 4 page CHART of all 17 types of penguins from smallest to largest. PJ looked at the pictures of penguins for a good hour in total.

I knew we had to go over each type of penguin rather than penguins as a group of Antarctic animals.

I started by trying out a few homemade black Playdough recipes because black is a hard color to find if not ordered on line.

Here are a few dependable sites if you would like to try your hand at it:

My dough turned out more a brownish color but I’m not one to waste. The cans I FINALLY found at Walmart were less than 1.00 dollar a piece. I kept my brown dough for PJ to use in a tropical penguin habitat.

What you need:

5 cans of black playdough
14 plastic eggs (we didn’t use eggs for the 3 smallest species of penguins just dough)
2 cans of white playdough
Small amount of orange and yellow playdough

Using the book for reference he formed black dough completely around an egg. The Emperor Penguin is the tallest and should have more dough than any other egg.