Winter Theme Part 1

This week I tried out a new unit, thanks to a VERY cute book I have and some ideas I found on Pinterest.  (Quick side note... I LOVE Pinterest!!)   The book was a fiction book called "Dear Polar Bear" by Barry Ablett.  Polar Bear writes letters to his other bear friends who live all over the globe. 

This sparked interest in my non-fiction loving first graders.  They spouted out fact after fact about all these bears.  I then went to the school library and checked out non-fiction books on each of the bears presented from "Dear Polar Bear".  The bears were brown bear, black bear, spectacled bear, and panda bear.  I found these wonderful pages to use along with this bear unit.

Today, our class did math (since we are grouping tens and ones) with how tall each of these bears were.  We used a yard stick to measure out yarn for four different bears.  The kids then measured the yarn (in small groups of course) with their cubes.  The polar bear can be up to 10 feet tall when standing on it's back legs... which means 140 cubes long in first grade terms.  :)

Then for science I just wanted to do it for FUN!  The unit in science I am really on is balance and motion, but I took a step back and went back to living organisms.  We did the classic blubber experiment.  The kids had so much fun that we even heard squeals.  :)  Our findings: Blubber keeps polar bears warm in icy waters. 

                                                               Glove without "blubber".

                                                                  Glove with "blubber"