We just finished our Amazing Arctic Adventures using the book "Mama Do You Love Me" as the springboard to learn about the Inuit People of Alaska.
We wrote stories after watching some videos about the Eskimos and the Iditarod and life in the North. |
File Folder Fun had some cute matching activities to identify the animals of the arctic I copied the matching game on 5 different colors of cardstock and gave 1 set out to each table to introduce the new mini unit. They worked cooperatively to match up all the Arctic Animals. Great game! One that was too easy for my group but has homophone matching with igloos and eskimos is HERE at File Folder Fun.
Here is our finished Watercolor "Northern Lights" and Arctic Animals Adventure stories |
The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights
Watercolor Polar Bear, wolf and igloo made a pretty Northern Lights nightscape. |
This video above is about 8 minutes and it shows how hard and simple the life of the traditional Inuit people are. It shows the children eating raw seal meat like candy. The kids were enthralled by it. I read them a few library books with Arctic Animal facts too.
Mama do you Love Me? by Barbara M. Joosse is such a sweet book. I have the tape too. So we listened to the tape and I had a copy of the text for kids to read along with the tape. There are kayaks, dogsleds, icebergs, lots of good vocabulary words.
Winter Writing project called Arctic Adventures. |
Beautiful Northern Lights watercolor pictures |
Loved this one too from LKSD.org. It gave me an inspiration for some of our our art projects below. |


It looks like she used a coffee filter around the eskimo head...CUTE and EASY! |

MUSIC
I have a pretty song I play in my classroom called "Northern Lights". HERE. and I typed up the words And I have a book I read the kids called The Fiddler of the Northern Lights by Natalie Warnock HERE. Both are great. I have also collected lots of animal blacklines from color books of arctic animals, inuit people, dogsleds and igloos. My goal is to teach the kids about life in the far north; the land of the eskimos and the Northern Lights.
More books we read as we were writing and finishing the Arctic Animals unit this week. The whole thing took us 2 weeks of writing time to finish.
VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLE Puzzlemaker Online will help you make a crossword puzzle with words to go with your Arctic animal unit VOCABULARY. Here are the words I used to make mine. Inuit/people of the arctic polar/white arctic bear fox/tricky white animal snowshoe hare/white bunny northern lights/colors in the sky snowy owl/talons and beak bird caribou/cousin of the reindeer narwhal/whale with a long, pointy tusk walrus/ocean animal with whiskers seals/polar bears and eskimos love to eat me eskimo/inuit people dogsled/team of animals for racing iceberg/big ice flow Iditarod/dogsled race in Alaska Arctic/cold area of the North. OR just check out the one I made HERE at puzzle-maker.
Pretty good story writing going on here. We shared each other's stories in class when we were finished.
Then we made a cool bulletin board. I love the watercolor below showing all the arctic animals in Mason's story with the Alaskan huskie dog, a snowshoe hare and a wolf. They were all "friends" Nobody wants to eat each other in 2nd grade fiction!
In our "Arctic Adventures" we brainstormed possible problems living in the arctic, and some solutions to those problems. The setting was somewhere in Alaska or Canada, Greenland, or Iceland. The characters could be any Arctic animals or the Eskimo Inuit people.
I think they turned out wonderful and very creative. And the combined pictures look so pretty too. What do YOU THINK?
VOCABULARY CROSSWORD PUZZLE Puzzlemaker Online will help you make a crossword puzzle with words to go with your Arctic animal unit VOCABULARY. Here are the words I used to make mine. Inuit/people of the arctic polar/white arctic bear fox/tricky white animal snowshoe hare/white bunny northern lights/colors in the sky snowy owl/talons and beak bird caribou/cousin of the reindeer narwhal/whale with a long, pointy tusk walrus/ocean animal with whiskers seals/polar bears and eskimos love to eat me eskimo/inuit people dogsled/team of animals for racing iceberg/big ice flow Iditarod/dogsled race in Alaska Arctic/cold area of the North. OR just check out the one I made HERE at puzzle-maker.
Pretty good story writing going on here. We shared each other's stories in class when we were finished.
Then we made a cool bulletin board. I love the watercolor below showing all the arctic animals in Mason's story with the Alaskan huskie dog, a snowshoe hare and a wolf. They were all "friends" Nobody wants to eat each other in 2nd grade fiction!
In our "Arctic Adventures" we brainstormed possible problems living in the arctic, and some solutions to those problems. The setting was somewhere in Alaska or Canada, Greenland, or Iceland. The characters could be any Arctic animals or the Eskimo Inuit people.
I think they turned out wonderful and very creative. And the combined pictures look so pretty too. What do YOU THINK?
4 comments:
Beautiful ideas, beautiful writing, but I don't think I can o all those activities in a class of 32 kindergarten students and no aid.
Oh my gosh I only have 22 kindergarten students! I can't even imagine 32! Why do they do that to teachers?? That must be kind of like going to the zoo!! It would be really hard to paint these pics unless you have at least 2 parent helpers. If your parents can cut out stacks of the white xeroxed animals that would be great too. Then kids just paint and glue instead of the 3rd step of cutting. That's how I'd do it. Good luck this year!
Do you have the link to download the templates for the sled dogs and the sled and eskimo? I would love to use those for some math facts like you suggested! Thanks!
Sorry I got those out of a borrowed book on January Activities I got from our school library. It is copyrighted. Here is a link to buy it cheap though! http://www.amazon.com/January-Monthly-Idea-Book-Original/dp/0439503701/ref=pd_sim_14_5?ie=UTF8&dpID=61H0lYL8o5L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR124%2C160_&refRID=17RYCV4TMD1KFBFRYS14
Post a Comment