Animals in Winter

ALuv and I just finished a 2-week unit in our science last week on animals in the winter.  We had fun and both learned quite a bit!  I wanted to share a few resources and ideas of how we integrated literacy into our study.  We focused on the three ways that animals survive in the winter time: hibernation, migration, & adaptation.

These are the books we read during our unit:

• Hibernation: Time To Sleep & Chipmunk At Hollow Tree Lane
• Migration: Honk! Honk! A Story of Migration
• Adaptation: Squirrels All Year Long
• Hibernation, Migration, & Adaptation: How & Why Animals Prepare for Winter, & Animals in Winter
• A couple of other great online resources are: Little Giraffes & ??  (I’m drawing a blank on the website, but it had a lot of great info.  Once I find it again, I’ll make sure I link it up here…can I blame the pregnant brain?)

One of his favorite activities that we did to integrate some writing was setting out food for the animals in our yard to eat.  (We did this when we talked about adaptation.)

He spread peanut butter on English muffins,

coated them in bird seed,

and set him outside.  We read the bird seed bag as it gave some helpful hints as to where to place our food.

After finding good places to “hide” our food, we watched and waited by the window.  As we saw different animals finding our treasures, ALuv kept a journal, documenting what he saw.

As we read books and learned about animals, we kept this running chart.  He felt we needed to add the category “die”, as some animals do not survive the winter; so we did.

At the end of our study, he did this cut and paste activity as a sort of assessment piece.

Thanks for joining This Reading Mama on a literacy journey!

~Becky