Antarctica Report

After our unit on Antarctica, I asked D to illustrate and write about any one thing that she wants from our unit on Antarctica.  This is her creation!

Scientist inside snow cave!

I love how she has layered her scientist (Sientest!) with all the warm clothes, boots and eye glasses!  This is now saved and is part of the Antarctica box!

Super Snow

If you live in the Mid-west, winter this year has been blessed with such warm weather! It feels like spring actually.  But the kids sure miss winter! D's favorite season is winter and this year has been such a disappointment for her.  Also how can you do an Antarctic Unit without playing with snow?!!

I found this product called "Super Snow" at one of the teacher supplies store.  So we decided to make our own snow.  I greeted D with this set up one day.

The process is simple, you just measure one teaspoon of this product and mix it with 4 oz of water.

Stir and stir and stir....

Here is some snow!

We made a larger batch later and D had a blast.  I am keeping this away from M as she tends to taste whatever she plays with.  I never knew about this product till date, am I the only one?

Iceberg Painting

Last Friday, we decided to be artists in Antarctica and paint an Iceberg using salt and paint! 

Here are two views of the finished product!

After we were done, we put our iceberg out in the snow!

I saw this activity here.  It might be a cool thing to do in the summer, but I thought D would enjoy it as part of our Antarctic Unit.  I was right, she spent a good amount of time on this activity and we even got to discuss some details of salt, ice and melting point!

Our Continent Boxes - Antarctica

This post is about our Antarctica Continent Box and its contents.  In my previous post in the Continent Series about our North America Box, I had posted about the kind of box I used.  Since the Montessori color for Antarctic is White, this box was perfect!  The front of the box has some White glitter scrapbook paper.  We also cut out some Antarctica animals and decorated the box with those.  All the pouches for the cards were made using scrapbook paper.  Nothing fancy, just a container to hold to the cards.

While deciding the contents of the box I had to keep D's interests in mind.  She is at the sensitive period for details on things.  So if I included pictures of whales in the box, then I better have details on each whale, how one differs from the other and so on.  I learnt so much while creating materials for this box!  Now I am well equipped to answer most of D's questions!

There are two major areas of focus on the materials - Animals and Scientists.  Here are our animal cards.

Here the focus is mainly on Penguins, Seals and Whales.  I also included a bunch of birds and crustaceans that are related to the food chain Antarctica. The Penguin cards are from here.  I made the rest using Google and Wikipedia. When I searched through our collection of Toob Animals, I realized that we did not have the Penguins or Ocean Animals Toob.  Our local Michaels did not have it either! So  for now we just have one penguin and one seal figurine!

From here, I got this interesting book called "Who's Eating Who?" that is a lovely read for my 5 year old.  It discusses a lot of details and gives an insight into the Food chain in Antarctica. I put the pages in a folder enclosing them in page protectors.

From here (made by Honey @ http://mondorfment.blogspot.com) I got this wonderful printout of an Emperor Penguin's lifecycle.  D loves "March of the penguins" and so these cards are perfect for her.

I printed out a map of Antarctica and some interesting pictures showing the South Pole, Ice bergs, Cruise ships, etc.

For information on Scientists I made this booklet from this website.  I got the idea from here.

As an add on to this book and to provide some activities for D, I made this paper doll with the different scientist clothing.  It has all the layers a scientist would wear in Antarctica. I got the images from here, colored and laminated the pieces.

D loves cars and enjoyed these Antarctica transportation cards that I made for her.  I got the details from here.

I have the map and the paper doll stored in a folder like this.

I made got this post card and stamps from Google.

I also created a few Artwork done in the Antarctica theme.  D especially loves the "Ship stuck on Ice" one!

No study of Antarctica would be complete without some info on Snow.  Here is a snowflake that we used during this art project we did.  The drawing of Snowflakes was done by D and added to the box! I made this easy reader booklet for her with some information on Snowflakes, how it is formed and its types.

For the books that we used for this study refer to this post.

I have a series of activities planned and I will post about those as we get them done.  We might add those to the box too.  Hope you enjoyed looking through our Antarctica Continent Box.  To take a peek at the other boxes, click here.

Snowflakes - Crayon Resist Watercolor

Here is another winter activity that is popular this season both on Pinterest and the blog world.  It fit well with our Antarctica unit too.  We had an afternoon of quiet art time today.

This activity is very simple.  

1. You use white or a light colored crayon to draw snowflakes or patterns of your choice on a sheet of paper.  
2. We also did a crayon rubbing of a big snowflake and some confetti. 
3. Cut the paper into into smaller pieces.  
4. Color each piece using water colors.  
5. Assemble your artwork, hang and enjoy!  

The pieces we used for crayon rubbing, plastic snowflake ornament and confetti.

Finished work, drying.

Proud display on our Art wall.

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Antarctic and Arctic Unit - Books

We've begun a unit study of Antarctica and the Arctic this week.  This has given us a chance to explore our Continent Box (post pending) in detail.  For this post, I am posting some of the wonderful books that we read that have inspired a lot of neat activities.  We own most of these and we did check out a few from the library.

These two books are about the Continent Antarctica. The first one gives an overview of the continent and it was an easy read for D. The next book is a read aloud with beautiful illustrations and repeating words.

 

Here are some of the animal books that we own and we've read this week.

 

 These two books, one about a gray whale that describes its journey from the Arctic to the Mexican lagoons and the other about a little emperor penguin's life, were interesting reads for D, as it presented a lot of facts in story form.

 

The next two are fictional stories that we've enjoyed along with the above. (The "Cow" one is hilarious!)

I also got the following three readers from the library for D to read to herself.

To help myself in answering all the questions D has about Antarctica, in addition to the above, I've also made a ton of cards and books with a lot of information on Antarctic Scientist, animals, transportation, weather, etc.  I will post about these in my next post about our Antarctica continent box.