Footprint Penguins – Patties Classroom

ACROSTIC POEMS:
My favorite form of poetry is ACROSTIC POETRY. It is easy and a good critical thinking skill to get kids to brainstorm lists of W words having to do with winter.

It is always funny when somebody says something off the wall, like Winnie the Pooh, for a W word on our Acrostic Poetry brainstorm. We all have a good laugh.

Then we move on to I words, then N words on the board as the kids help by brainstorming and I will help by calling out generic words like “In, Nobody, White” etc.

Word Bank of January Words – I put up a new one each month. It
really reduces the “Teacher how do you spell….?” questions a lot!

It’s fun to then choose a favorite word from the lists we have made and come up with a sentence telling about your own favorite parts of winter.

As you can see, they all write about what THEY love about winter….or DON’T love….as the case may be.

After writing our Winter Acrostic Poems, we make snowmen out of cut snowflakes and white paint stamped snowflakes and colored paper hats and scarves, with colored dot stickers for buttons.

Winter.Acrostics and Snowflake Snowmen…..

Snowman Art using snowflakes is really a pretty bulletin board outside our classroom for January.

After everybody has the WIN of winter, we move to T words, then E words then R words. I write them as a LIST under each letter so it’s easy for the kids to choose a word to start with.

After writing our Winter Acrostic Poems, we make snowmen out of cut snowflakes and white paint stamped snowflakes and colored paper hats and scarves, with colored dot stickers for buttons.

Here are our finished Winter Acrostic Poems on our bulletin board. Super cute.

Well, the snowmen are really cute too!

I have a huge collection of Winter Books and Stories; non fiction and fiction that fill my bookcase. Here

are just a few of my favorites.

We sing Songs about Snowmen too. Here is one to the tun of Itsy Bitsy Spider.

Last year we did Penguin Acrostic Poems with footprint Penguin Art….

Here is the Footprint and thumbprint penguins painted black on blue paper. I added glitter glue stars afterwards. They

These stickers are really cute to add to the writing projects we do. I love them!

And here are our PENGUIN ACROSTIC POEMS….They were really cute too.

Penguin Footprint Art with baby thumbprint penguins too. This one took a LONG TIME to finish because I had to paint with the kids practically 1 on 1. So this year we did tear art penguins with penguin stories. They are almost done.

I have literally dozens of penguin books in my classroom library. I love all of the Tacky the Penguin ones especially.

My favorite Penguin Children’s Book of all Time. I try to do “Text Sets” of non-fiction books AND story books on the same topics or themes.

The they make their own sentences and we try to add an adjective to each of them. They always turn out beautiful and wintery sounding.

Well, we are done with our cute footprint Penguins. They turned out so hilarious looking. Here’s a sampling of our Works of Art ….

The kids added all the embellishments….

We used washable poster paint for most everything…..

Then we added some PENGUIN ACROSTIC POETRY to our penguins. I think the easiest way to do
Acrostic Poems is to do a brainstorm on the board. Then they have a brainstorm of words to choose from to do their poems.

Using P at the top…then an E….then an N…..and separate each letter with a marker line. Then have the kids come up to the whiteboard and add words or you write the words they call out…….(interactive writing). It’s quick and fun.

Here’s our Acrostic Poetry Bulletin Board…..I’m going to add the footprint penguins to it on Monday…

After the footprints (and black thumbprints) were dry….we added white bellies….

We carefully painted on “potato shaped” bellies and painted our fingers white then stamped them onto the black
thumbprint for the baby bellies….

Then we did the scarves and hats….and when all were dry we used black and orange markers for the babies’ faces and waddling feet…..The penguin beaks are orange construction paper triangles….and the wiggly eyes we glued on too….

Here we are painting our feet at a center table…the kids really helped each other!

It took about an hour to finish just the black footprint of each student…..

It was a fun art project. But painting feet and then washing them off was no picnic. And they all said “Wow, that’s COOOOLD!” I guessed it would be…..hehe……

Put a piece of butcher paper or drop cloth under the painters…..and have a bin of water for stepping into to wash off…. and paper towels for trying off those little cold feet!

Others were writing while finished writers were painting…while finished painters went to centers….
It was controlled chaos for an hour!

I’m going to back these cute Penguins with black paper. I added glitter glue snowflakes, and the kids added orange, triangle beaks and wiggly eyes after painting on their hats and scarves.

I thought the gold paint turned out pretty…..as did the little thumbprint baby penguins…..

The feet were hard to paint and print…some of those toes got a little squished….

And they had to let them dry before painting the white bellies (or fingerprinted bellies on the babies) but they did a great job I thought…..I just let them do their own thing with the paints….and nobody really went too crazy!

I set up a “PENGUIN BOOK CENTER” Where kids can read all about the many different types of
Penguins found mostly in the South Pole. They thought it was interesting that none are found in the North Pole.

A site with lots of Penguin Activity Pages is HERE at Kidzone.

RIDDLE: What’s black & white and goes round and round?
A: A penguin stuck in a revolving door.

The kids painted their own designer hats and scarves….from red and gold to purple with polka dots!

Then they wrote their Penguin Acrostic Poems……

They turned out lovely…..

We also read a play from the book TACKY THE PENGUIN. It is my favorite Children’s Book….
Even after the hundreds of books I’ve read. It teaches kids that even though somebody is different, they
can be special in their own way. Tacky becomes a hero in his little Iceberg village….. Link HERE at Reading Lady if you want a copy of the Reader’s Theater Play. The kids loved being the characters.

My Favorite Children’s Book…..Helen Lester has written a series of Tacky books for kids…..all are darling and

send a great message about accepting others as they are and being a good friend…..

A unit using Tacky the Penguin and some story frames for writing your own Penguin Story with a problem and solution can be found HERE at Trinity Education. I used some of the ideas last year when the kids wrote their own penguin stories. Link HERE for Penguins on Parade if you want to see some of our finished Penguin Stories.