Letter P/Penguin Preschool Theme

Today we talked about the letter P and penguins!

We have some penguin lovers in our house especially my kindergartener, but my preschooler also enjoys them as well.  We read "National Geographic Kids Penguins!" book.  All of their books have fun pictures, great facts that are easy for kids to understand, and even jokes.

We also look through a Zoo Book magazine about penguins.  The magazines are geared toward older kids, but there are some fun pictures throughout and it helped us remember things we learned about in the other book.

We also read this online book about penguins on Starfall.  This is even more basic than the previous two sources so if you have a pretty small audience or one just not interested in penguins then it is a great one. We also did the letter p things on Starfall while we were there.

Here is a fun coloring page about penguins and the letter P.

Here is an entire printable pack P is for Penguins that includes another cute coloring page pictured below.

2 Teaching Mommies has a Polar Lands pack with fun penguin printables like these below.

It also includes this fun "Feed the Penguin" activity.  Instead of actual feeding the penguin I made some word strips with some basic sight words and the names of our family members for my son to read as he "fed" the penguin.  I have noticed that he recognizes a lot of words that I have never taught him so it is fun to see what he knows.

The words I used were basic like, "to", "the", "see", "go" to name a few.

Here is a pattern for a penguin mask craft.  Ours looks a little different.  We started making it and my son thought it was kind of creepy so we don't have a beak or any of the extras and decided to do something else instead. I did get him to use the mask long enough for a picture.

 A couple of years ago I made an edible penguin with my middle son I when the mask wasn't working out I decided to do that again with things I had on hand.  I didn't have the exact things on hand as I did before, but some of the same things.  Last time I used a hershey kiss for the head.  This time I used a rolo for the head, oreo for the body, and starburst for the feet and beak.

Here is a close up of the edible penguin.

National Geographic's website has this fun little online game as well as videos of penguins that we explored as well.

You can also check out our penguin activities from 2011 and from 2012.