Winter Animal Fun

Last week, I was prepping for a week of Arctic and Antarctic Animals. I needed some center and hands on activities for the week but I just couldn’t find what my students needed. What is a gal to do but create it! Let me introduce you to some winter animal learning fun integrating math and phonics.  This is what we used this past week for our learning centers.

Winter Animal Fun: Matching Letters and Sounds

We used these puffin themed cards to play a matching letters and sounds activity. Student can just match the uppercase letter to the lowercase letter, or for an added challenge, they can include the sound as well.

This is a great review to keep all those sounds in our brains. Because the pictures are fun, my students ran here to match.

Winter Animal Fun: CVC Words

Another learning activity we used what this whale themed CVC word center. I divided up the cards according to the short vowel sound. Student looked at the picture given and wrote the word on the line. Even though we practice writing CVC words often, we can never practice this skill enough,

We always need more and more practice here. Especially now that we have moved onto digraphs.

Winter Animal Fun: Digraphs

This month, we have learning about the digraphs ch, sh, and th. I knew practicing these sounds would be a must. We used these arctic animal strips to build the words on ice floes. It is a fun way to integrate our unit and phonics skills.

Winter Animal Fun: Word Families

We have been diving in deep with a and i word families. I always feel great about word families until we start mixing them. Then I see my readers’ confidence loose its beautiful momentum. We used polar bears with short a word families and seals for short e word families. Students used their animals to sort into the right word family. This is the next step in visual discrimination for my learners and we are going to master it… with time and attention.

Winter Animal Fun: Counting and Matching

Counting sets and matching them to a number is another skill that we continuously work on all year long. We are working on using sets of 10 and adding the ones to count our number faster and more accurately. We are using the ten frames of fish to feed to our puffins to match the number. You can also use the mats and a dry erase marker to color in the number needed.

Winter Animal Fun: Comparing Numbers

We are doing great with number sense in my room and we are rocking comparing numbers. This week, we started our math small groups with a quick comparing numbers activity using both numbers and ten frames. This went quickly because it was a review.

Once we compared our numbers, we related comparing numbers to weight, which is our new skill we are learning about this week.  You can see how the 15=15 comparison number is on the balanced scale because both sides are equal. 

We had three scales to place our comparison strips on: one balanced, one with the lighter side on the left, and one with the lighter side on the right. Students took their comparison numbers and placed them on the scales. To say we rocked this was an understatement. Plus, we bridged connections between what we understand and we are developing.

How to we store and use these activities?

All of these activities get stored in baggies and placed in a color coded basket. (I got these baskets from Really Good Stuff but you can also grab them here on Amazon.)

Students take the color coded basket to the matching color coded table to work at center time.

Looking for these activities?

If you can use these activities in your classroom, like I needed them, you can click here to grab a total of 9 winter animal themed learning activities for a great price.
I know you will love these activities and using them in your classroom.

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