When we walked in last Monday, the classroom had been transformed to Antarctica!
The week before, we had begun research on the frozen continent as our last stop on the trip around the world our social studies standards have taken us on! We read a variety of nonfiction texts such as Antarctic Journal, Explore Antarctica, and various ReadWorks articles to find out all about Antarctica!
The students had also been told to dress in all black and white, although they didn't know why. Aren't they precious penguins?
All this set the stage for a new novel study:
When the students returned from specials later in the morning, a mysterious package had arrived!
Based on several pieces of evidence on the box that matched clues from Mr. Popper's Penguins, we predicted it would be a penguin. And we were right!
Along with our new friend came the following challenge:
Here are a few pictures of the students building, testing, researching, and improving!
The students calculated the change in temperature from the time they removed the thermometer from the ice chest housing our penguin friend until the time they took the thermometer out of their insulated box which had sat under the heat lamp for 5 minutes. The goal was to minimize temperature change using our growing knowledge of insulation and heat transfer!
Results:
Squad # Degrees of Temperature Change
1 24
2A 22
2B 20
3 28
4A 28
4B 21
1 24
2A 22
2B 20
3 28
4A 28
4B 21
My son, Clark, who is in kindergarten, wanted to build a penguin house too! His design tied for second place with 21 degrees of change!