Rory the Penguin

  

I assured Rory that Polar Bears stay in the Arctic Circle....He seemed a little nervous!

   We had a special visitor this week!  An Emperor Penguin showed up and surprised us all.  At 48 inches tall, we first graders are all taller than Rory.  He certainly sparked a flurry of interest in penguins.  We used our new friend to predict how many of the kindergartners would be taller than Rory.  We tallied and graphed our data!  Rory brought a bucket of snowballs when he came that we used to predict and tally.  We predicted how many snowballs we could get in the bucket when we stood 48 inches away.  We could even find the difference between how many made it and how many didn't.
    There are so many great books about penguins.  We read nonfiction and fiction.  We voted on our favorite penguin book and the winner was 365 Penguins by Jean Luc-Fromental.

A great book that I caught a couple of students reading during freetime! We really liked the part when they found out they would get to keep the penguin with blue feet as a pet.

Rory felt right at home with first graders.

     After making our own penguins with our footprints,  we'll use different items from our math tubs next week to measure our own penguins and chart our results.
   When I found Rory in the kitchen drinking coffee I knew he might be feeling a little to comfortable at our school!  It might be time for him to go home.

   The best response I heard all week was, "It's too bad Jessica isn't  in school.  She's missing all the fun."  Jessica is in Disney World!!

I made the penguin with the help of a computer projector and a daughter!  Using foam board we projected the image on the foam board traced and then colored.  We had to move the projector to just the right position to get our penguin to the right size!

We were starting to feel a little dizzy from the pen fumes, so we  used a fan to move the air around!