Penguins

My first Unit Study ever!  Now, in theory I'm not really a unit study kind of gal.  I am actually pretty hard-core classical.  But for preschool and for fun, unit studies are great.  So for my first attempt at "organized" preschool, I decided to do a unit on my husband's favorite animal, penguins.

This week has been ALL penguins.  The four books pictured I got from the library.  And can I just say, I love our library system?  It has several libraries in it, and I can request a book from any of them and they will be at my library, waiting for me to pick them up!  I love it.  Anyways, we really enjoyed all these books, but Lydia especially enjoyed A Penguin Story, while my husband's favorite was Pierre the Penguin.  He actually called it "charming."  We have read each of these books at least once a day this week.

We also did a heart penguin craft.  Lydia loves hearts because there are some on her shoes and we call them her "pretty heart shoes," so I knew she'd love this one.  Here's the link to the template.  We colored the hearts black and red and talked about the colors.  Then I cut them out and we counted the hearts (several times.  Lydia loves counting).  Then Lydia wanted to talk about which ones were big and which ones were little.

After that discussion, I glued them together and we each had our very own heart penguin.  I named mine Snowflake, after the pink penguin in Scamper the Penguin, which we're watching later this week and I'm ashamed to say I actually own on DVD.

Other Penguiny things we've done or are going to do: We watched this short interactive story, we have a number of coloring sheets and a few more crafts to do.  I did find an adorable Oreo penguin snack, but that would require having lots of leftover Oreos, and as we have recently renewed our efforts to eat healthily, that wouldn't be a good idea.

We also play with Starfall everyday and Lydia's getting closer to being able to recognize that reading is just putting letters together.  Before this week she knew all her letter sounds if you asked her, "what does B say?" or "what sound does L make?," but she didn't know how to reverse it.  So if you said, "what letter says sssss?" she wouldn't have a clue.  After the last three or four days of working on it, though, she had a breakthrough and now recognizes what I call the Transitive Property of Letter Sounds.

I would say, overall, that this has been a very successful first attempt, and now I'm just faced with the question of what unit study to do next?