Feed The Penguin

I can’t believe it has taken us four months until we included our handmade penguins in a play activity. For those of you who do not know, everyday throughout 2016 Adam is having a penguin delivered to our house. Last year we fell in love with the story 365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental. I had this crazy idea that we too could have our own penguins delivered. Why not read about our #365Penguins adventures so far in our January, February and March updates.

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Our penguins are incredibly easy to make – they have to be as I am making 365 of them! You can see our tutorial here. For our Feed The Penguin activity I simply took a few handmade penguins, cut a piece of paper to fit on top of the cup and wrote numbers between 1 and 20. The penguins were placed on a blue plate.

Next I needed some food to feed to the penguins. As this weeks #toolsforlearning theme is snacks I decided to use Burton’s Fish & Chips Crisps. These fish and chip shaped crisps used to be popular in the 1980’s and production of them stopped in the 1990’s. However, a national newspaper ran a poll to bring back a retro brand and Burton’s Fish and Chip salt and vinegar crisps won. I emptied all the fish shaped crisps into a bowl for Adam to use for our activity.

The activity was simple. Adam had to identify the number on top of the penguin and feed the penguin that many fish shaped snacks.

Adam picked up the activity in no time at all. Within moments he had fed all six penguins correctly. To continue the game we simple tipped the fish snacks back into the bowl and chose some different numbered penguins.

Adam did prefer to only having one penguin on the plate at a time. He liked to placed the fish crisp up to the penguins mouth before placing it on the plate.

After feeding numerous penguins Adam placed two penguins on the plate. Each penguin had the number 2 on top. Initially I assumed that Adam was going to feed the penguins two fish each. However, as he kept adding more and more fish to the plate I realised that he had used the penguins as place value markers and created the number 22. He didn’t stop adding fish to the plate until he had fed the penguins 22 fish.

I wonder what other play adventures our 365 Penguins will have throughout the year!

Check out these Snack activities as part of the #toolsforlearning series:

How Many Cows on the Farm Counting Game from Life Over C’s

Gold Fish Measurement Math Game from Learning 2 Walk

Find the Letters Snack Sheet from Still Playing School

Crushed Rainbow Cereal Process Art from Play Dough & Popsicles

Teach Preschoolers Fractions from Preschool Powol Packets

Jelly Bean Maths Game from Mum in the Madhouse

How Many Goldfish in the Bowl Game from Play & Learn Everyday

Cheerios Number Tracing from Schooling a Monkey

10 Fun Games with ABC Pretzels from Books and Giggles

Fish Cracker Color Patterns from The Kindergarten Connection