Your Personal Penguin

One of the things I love best about homeschooling and reading all the blogs I do is being able to use everyone else's ideas.

Almost Unschoolers must have known I had fractions on Froggy's upcoming schedule when she posted a great peguin craft. I saved the link, added some penguin books to our library list and viola an easy stArt and math project in one.  We read 365 Penguins which many others had recommended as a great January book and one I was not familiar with.  Froggy also pulled out an old favorite and we sang Personal Penguin  over and over while cutting and pasting.

Since I do not have an older child who needed to practice compass work we opted to trace our circles instead of using a compass.  We used a lid from one our cookie tins for the 2 black circles and the one white circle.  We traced smaller tin for the orange circle.

 

Then Froggy cut the second black and the white circle first in half then in half again to make quarters.

She also tried to cut the little circle into quarters but her cutting skills were not up to it so we made a second circle that I cut into quarters.

 Then it was time to glue.  The focus of the lesson was fractions since that is our math theme for the week.  Froggy is great with half but not so great with quarters and thirds but getting there.  However I realized in reading Almost Unschoolers writeup that we have not even introduced symmetry so I took the opportunity when getting ready to glue to introduce it.

We moved the wings to a couple of  different places before gluing.  "Does this look right?" No Froggy knew exactly where the wings should be and I explained that what made it right was called symmetry.

We did not have googly eyes to finish him off but I think the improvised circles I cut at the last minute do the job just fine (must remember to get assorted googly eyes at the next Michaels outing.)

For other neat math ideas come visit the blog hop at Joyful Learning