Pack your classroom with hands-on activities all about what animals do in the winter. I have rounded up my favorite hibernation centers and activities.
You'll Love These Winter Animals for Preschool Ideas, these winter animal printables are perfect for kids, teaching ideas, hands on learning, coloring pages, Hibernation, Migration and more for Free
FREE worksheet to sort between animals who hibernate and migrate. Great science cut and paste activity for kindergarten and preschool.
Check out this small but mighty hibernation books list that is just right for preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten circle times!
It is snowing & cold here today which is making us want to stay in and hibernate so I thought I would post some favorite hibernation classroom activities, games, books, songs, and crafts. Pajama Day A great way to culminate your unit on hibernation is to have a Pajama Day! Children (and teachers) wear their […]
HIBERNATION Worksheets Activity Preschool Pre K Kindergarten 1st GradeHere's a fun set of 3 simple cut and paste worksheets for young learners to share what they know about hibernation! Enjoy these Hibernation Worksheets for Preschool, Pre-K, and Kindergarten❤ CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW GREEN APPLE LESSO...
As the weather starts to cool down, many people, including myself, find it hard to wake up and get out of bed in the morning. Not only do humans find this hard, but many animals
Ideas for a unit on winter animals: hibernation, migration, and more winter animal adaptations. Hands-on learning, centers, writing, and more
If you are studying Hibernation this winter, this ELA unit will be a great addition! Here is a look inside. Hibernation ELA Unit Animals in Winter- Use the word chart to support writers as they write about animals in winter. There are several readers discussing animals in winter. Get up and moving with this hibernation write the room activity. There are 5 Hibernation Themed Literacy Centers: Bear Cave Ending Sound Sort CVC Mix Up- Unscramble each CVC word. Bear Blends- Cover each picture with a bear counter. Feed the Groundhog Sight Words- Feed the groundhog sight words. This no prep spin and cover is also included. Snowy Substitutions- Spin and substitute the beginning sound for each word. There are 5 read aloud book recommendations, with a reading comprehension skill and writing prompt. I hope this can help with your ELA plans this winter!
These adorable FREE activities to go along with The Mitten will be emailed to you within minutes! We love using this story throughout the month of January, and even more activities are included in my unit shown below.
This Hibernating Bear Alphabet Game is a fun way for your preschoolers to practice identifying lowercase and capital letters this winter.
These adorable FREE activities to go along with The Mitten will be emailed to you within minutes! We love using this story throughout the month of January, and even more activities are included in my unit shown below.
It is snowing & cold here today which is making us want to stay in and hibernate so I thought I would post some favorite hibernation classroom activities, games, books, songs, and crafts. Pajama Day A great way to culminate your unit on hibernation is to have a Pajama Day! Children (and teachers) wear their […]
With this Hibernating Animals Printable Book, kids will practice reading simple text, learn about hibernation, and more!
As the weather starts to cool down, many people, including myself, find it hard to wake up and get out of bed in the morning. Not only do humans find this hard, but many animals
Have you read Jan Brett's new book called The Snowy Nap? It is about Hedgie (the hedgehog from The Hat) trying to stay up to see what his animal friends do during the winter before he hibernates. If you haven't seen this book, you must check it out! Jan Brett's books and illustrations are always so captivating for kids and adults alike. I love the little cut out pictures on the side and how you can talk about what is happening in the side pictures while the characters are doing something else in the story. It is just great for developing executive function skills and theory of mind. We loved using our retelling cards to retell and then act out the story. Then, we couldn't forget our hedgehog snack! Each Friday we make a snack to match our theme... it gives us something to look forward to! We used pre-made sugar cookies, frosting, chocolate chips, and cocoa krispies. Didn't they turn out cute? After reading The Snowy Nap, we had so many questions about hibernation. {Which animals hibernate? Why do they hibernate? Where do they hibernate?} We did a little research to figure out our answers and then made a poster to teach others what we learned. I helped by drawing some of the background and giving them pictures to color so that we could focus on interactive writing. We used our favorite Kwik Stix paint for our mural. If you haven't tried them you must! They are paint sticks that dry in 60 seconds...amazing! If you'd like to try them, you can click here and use the code COFFEETALK10 for 10% off (affiliate link). We also enjoyed reading A Time to Sleep to help us better understand the variety of the animals that hibernate and where they hibernate. To answer the question "why do animals hibernate?", I froze blueberries in a container and asked the kids to pretend to be hungry bears and get enough berries to eat out of the ice. They tried dropping the ice on the table to break it or digging the berries out of the ice, but they couldn't get enough to be full. We left the frozen berries in the container overnight and observed that we could get all the berries out when the ice melted. We made a bear paw for snack out of a graham cracker, Reese's cup, chocolate chips, and peanut butter. Do you teach about hibernation in your classroom? What are your favorite activities and books? Happy Teaching!
I've had lots of requests to share more about how I foster inquiry in our classroom, so I'm here to share some information about our current inquiry, animals in winter! We started with inquiry brainstorm time. We do these when we wrap up our last inquiry and we are looking for new topics to investigate. I ask the students what they are wondering about/want to learn about and they can tell me anything they want. I usually record it by typing it into a word document and I have it projected on to the screen so the kids can watch and follow along as their question get's typed up into the list. I can also type must faster than I can write on chart paper so it's less waiting for the kids. After they kids give me all of their questions I go back during my prep or after school and group them into similar categories. Then I pick the category that generated the most interest. This month we had a lot of kids asking where animals go when it's cold (or in their words "freezing") outside. In particular they were wondering about birds, turtles, worms, butterflies, hyenas, coyotes and foxes. So I decided to plan some lessons around hibernation, migration and weather/climate in various habitats. First I started with hibernation. On the first day we read the book "Why Do Animals Hibernate?" by David Martin. This is a great simple book that explains what hibernate means, why animals hibernate, which animals hibernate and where they hibernate. At the teacher table I had one student come and find the page where hibernation was defined and copy the sentence to add to our inquiry board. This works on reading to find important information in non-fiction texts. You can see it on the bulletin board picture at the bottom of the blog post. For centre time, I put together this little den building centre! The prompt was "Can you build a den for the bears to hibernate in?" As they were building we talked about what would make a good den (e.g. has a covering at the top so the snow doesn't get in, has a small hole at the front of the den so the bear can get in and out but not too big so that we can minimize the cold air coming in etc.) There prompts really helped the kids think about their design for the dens! They loved this building challenge! On the second day, we read the book "Sleep Black Bear, Sleep" by Jane Yolen to learn more about which animals hibernate. Then we wrote down the animals that hibernate on chart paper. During centre time students who wanted to came to the teacher table and used the chart we co-created whole group to write about animals that hibernate. You can see some of their writing on the bulletin board near the bottom of this post. Next morning, we had a hibernating bear craft available at centre time. I saw this idea on Primary Press and knew we had to do it too. My kids love craft activities so I just put some tracers (always optional) and black, brown and beige construction paper and let them get to work! I didn't provide any instructions, just a sample for them to look at. Some students followed my sample, some didn't and I think they all turned out great :) I also encouraged them to either trace the sentence "Bears hibernate in the winter" or use the sheet with blank lines to write their own hibernation sentence. One of my girls wrote her own sentence "The baby bear is hibernating." (Bottom left on the bulletin board photo near the bottom of this post). If you can use the hibernation writing strip or the blank writing strip, you can download it for free by clicking here or on the image below: Here's one that one of my kiddos made. He said he made a mama bear sleeping in a den with her two baby bears! I love that he added the cubs on his own! And here is the beginning of our animals in winter inquiry board! The inqury writing papers and mini checklists can be found in my "Inquiry Writing Templates for Kindergarten" pack on TPT. You can click here or on the image below if you are interested! Here is a photo of our bookshelf with all of our hibernation books! We didn't read them all but the two I read to them that were mentioned in this post are pictured. Students are welcome to read these during centre time. I pulled from my own collection, my school librarian pulled some for me (love her) and I got some from my local public library. We've moved on to migration and we'll probably be working on learning about migration for one more week. I'll be posting about migration once we wrap up as part 2 of this post! - Yukari SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave
These adorable FREE activities to go along with The Mitten will be emailed to you within minutes! We love using this story throughout the month of January, and even more activities are included in my unit shown below.
These adorable FREE activities to go along with The Mitten will be emailed to you within minutes! We love using this story throughout the month of January, and even more activities are included in my unit shown below.
