Aquarium penguins

To go with our Penguin Unit, we went to the aquarium because they have penguins there! This normally would have been too expensive of a field trip, but since we usually do a family activity for birthdays anyway, we counted this as Daisy's birthday present. (Warning: all these pictures are terrible, but they remind me of a nice day, so I look at them fondly anyway.)

I went to the aquarium with Abe's school class last year and he's been wanting to go back with the family ever since. The aquarium has grown a lot since we first went there seven years ago (the day I was in labor with Sebby---at that time it was just a big empty room with some stingrays in a tank and, like, an octopus. Super disappointing.) and it's quite fun. I think they are dreaming of/ fundraising for a bigger space (of course they are; when is a place like this not fundraising?!) and I can see that several of the exhibits are not . . . ideally situated (e.g. none of the kids could really see the penguins on land, since the waterline was above their eye level, and of course there are big "NO CLIMBING" signs on any surface that might be remotely helpful in boosting them up). Still, we really liked the penguins (they are Gentoo Penguins, which look like they have little white headbands on. So cute!) best, but we really enjoyed everything. There's a display where you can get an electric shock like you'd get from an electric eel, which of course all the children had to try 500 times. We liked the otters a lot, too.

Cute baby sharks

Little Blue Penguin and little pink baby

Daisy was riveted to this exhibit

Penguin Races

It kind of looks like Daisy is dressed as a penguin, but it's really her panda bear suit (but that gives me an idea for Halloween!)

These penguin egg races were way too hard to actually carry out (the rice-filled sock "egg" just would NOT stay on anyone's feet, not even for a moment) but luckily, these people don't really need to be accomplishing something or succeeding at a task in order to have a huge amount of giggling, silly fun.

Penguin Unit and water bottle penguins

Daisy has loved her blanket from the time she was a tiny baby, but she didn't really have a favorite animal until she got this little fellow. Then it was just penguins, penguins, penguins from then on, and every time the boys brought up their imaginary "Birdie land" or "Monkey land" or "Bear land"s---Daisy chirped out her little "Penguin land!" stories right along with them.

So, for sweet Daisy's birthday week (she turned 3!) it seemed only right to do a penguin unit. Abe was at choir camp for a few of the days, and it was kind of a hectic time for us, so we made this a mini-unit, but we managed to pack in a lot of penguiny activities for our little Penguin.

Usually I don't worry too much about whether or not all of our activities really interest Daisy---she wants to do things with us about 70% of the time (she thinks she can do anything her brothers do), but if she gets bored and wanders off it's fine. But I did make an effort to do lots of hands-on stuff for this unit so she could participate the whole time if she wanted to. She loooooves coloring and cutting things out, and I found the most awesome set of paper crafts about penguins. We did 5 or 6 of these and everyone loved them---from Daisy all the way up to Abe. I think there is a fee to download, but if you upload something to share, you can download something free. I uploaded a flower worksheet I'd made and felt I got much the better end of the deal. :) I love crafts that actually have a purpose to them and the "waddle, toboggan, and hop" penguins were particularly inspirational to little Daisy. I loved the lift-the-flap pages too. Just a great all-around set of activities.

The other craft we did was these water-bottle penguins. I just sort of made them up as we went along, going off of a coffee-creamer-bottle bird I'd seen online. You just stuff a water bottle with polyfill, then cut out a rough back shape from black cloth (no really, I mean rough. I drew something like this on the cloth and let the kids cut it, no template or anything, and they all turned out cute in spite of my total lack of artistic ability. I'm sure you could improve on it:) and glue it around the back of the water bottle.

Then you just cut out orange feet out of paper and glue them on the bottom, and glue an orange triangle beak just under the lid. And googly eyes above it. Oh yes, and I also had them color a strip of black with marker  along the lid above the eyes. And that's ALL! And no, this isn't the kind of craft I love best (no real educational link) but they are so cute! And Daisy loved them so much! And the kids run around honking them at each other and pretending they have babies on their feet, so they're a success in my book.