I have found that primary students can only hang on to a Unit theme/topic for a few weeks before it feels like you are beating a dead horse. Primary students are still learning how to read and write, and their listening comprehension skills don’t lend itself to full movies just yet. I wanted to have something fun and new, but still on the general topic of winter/cold. Out came Polar Animals. This unit covers all things polar animals, while focusing on Penguins.
The winter/Hiver unit that we started in December was coming to an end and I wasn’t ready start Carnival just yet, so what were we going to do in January? We already have our Animals Unit scheduled for May/June, but that was only going to cover Pets and Farm animals. I decided to do polar animals and explore Penguins this year. Next year we can revisit Polar Animals and focus on Polar Bears, or something else that class decides.
There are several short videos, emergent readers, preposition and number recognition and speaking activities to help students learn the basic language of Polar Animals. The information itself runs alongside the Primary Social Studies curriculum. Students love to show off their knowledge from their English classes and “teach me” all about the Polar Regions, Blubber and how ice is formed.
As I like to teach “the same thing” each year, I will need to update this unit for be “new” . My grade 1’s will start grade 2 and not want to do Penguins again. For obvious reasons. This unit will continue to grow as the years go on, to include other Polar Region animals that we focus on. A different one for each year of primary school; next year Polar bears. The year after that, who knows.
Find the Polar Animals unit and much more on my TPT store
What’s Included:
- daily lesson plan with prompts and link suggestions
- Sentence generation from a word bank
- Facts page
- Reading comprehension texts and questions
- Parts of a penguin activity
- J’ai froid – how do we keep warm
- Speaking activity – sondage
- Identify verbs vs adjectives and prepositions
- Mini reader – Qu’est-ce que tu vois
- Mini reader – Que porte le pingouin. Colours and winter clothes
- Emergent Reader – All About Penguins
- Emergent Reader – Polar Animals
- Polar animals patterns in Black and white, and colour
- Counting Penguins booklet – numbers 1-10
- Qui suis-je – create the descriptions and stump the older students
- Emergent Reader – Qui vit dans les regions polaire
- Matching numbers to words with penguins and fish – two formats
- End of unit Fact sheet – summarizing our knowledge
Leave a note in the comments for suggestions on what to focus on in the coming years.
Mme B's Classroom 
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