Mama, Do You Love Me? Eskimo Activities

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. 

 We called them Amazing Arctic Adventures......

Here are some of the book I bought on Amazon and a Scholastic News we read.  I also bought DOGTEAM BY Gary Paulsen which has beautiful illustrations by his wife and talks about the dogsled races of Alaska like the Iditarod.

 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.

 I showed the kids this cool short 2 minute video on the winner of the 2012 IDITAROD RACE showing what "Mushing" is really like!

Winter Writing project called Arctic Adventures.

Beautiful Northern Lights watercolor pictures 

  ART  A cool arctic snowy owl art project I found at Family Fun and it uses pine cones and pillow fiberfill. I have an old pillow I think I will rip open and bring to school to use up the pine cones I've been saving and make some cool snowy owls.

Loved this one too from LKSD.org. It gave me an inspiration for some of our our art projects below. 

     

MATH Make multiplication problems on the dogs and eskimos and answers on the dogsleds for a fun math match-game. SPELLING Another cute art project I found and the link is HERE at Heidisongs.com. You could white out the SIGHT words she has OR put your own spelling words for the week inside the picture instead. That's what I'm doing. I love linking my spelling activity to what we are learning about.

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

 My inspiration for these lovely watercolors and polar bears is from That Artist Woman's website where she did some polar bear winter landscapes with first graders using watercolor paper, paint and gesso HERE.

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?