Penguin and Pinecone by Salina Yoon: Using Your Senses {Read and Play}

We jumped in with Virtual Book Club for Kids and their weekly book selections this past week. Since S has only a year and a half until she starts Kindergarten, I figure it might be a good idea to start doing more to get her ready. It was so fun when we followed along while N was a preschooler... This week's theme is penguins, and the main book is Penguin and Pinecone by Salina Yoon. We love her Penguin series and S was super excited when this one came in at the library! (seriously, holds are awesome!)

There are so many directions you can take this book, one of the reasons we love the series! We went the science route and combined it with art!
**Check out my inspiration of the painting activity over at Inspirational Laboratories**

What you need:

• Penguin and Pinecone by Salina Yoon
• objects from around the house to practice using the senses (Sight, Sound, Touch, Smell, Taste)
• Rocks (we searched for ours outside. Yay, Desert Nature!)
• Black, white and orange paint
• paintbrush
• newspaper (I'm just glad I had the wipes available! oops!)
• wipes for quick and easy surface clean-up

We've read the book several times by this point. I opened this "lesson" by feeling, sniffing, and looking at the book.

When I get to the point where Penguin is using his senses to discover that pinecone is not a snowball and cold we pause and talk about what Penguin is doing in each of the images (using sight/eyes, taste/mouth/tongue, touch/hands/feel).

Discuss the senses and how we use them to observe and make sense of the world which surrounds us. Practice on objects from around the house and what senses we use for those particular objects. We used a koosh pool ball, a soft rattle, a foam number, and a lolipop!

Using sight, touch, (and maybe smell) search for the perfect rock on which to paint your own penguin. We talked about not always using all our senses (we don't want to lick rocks, Yuck!)

If you decide to wash off your rocks, give them time to dry. We just dry brushed off the dirt before starting.

While we painted we talked about P being for Penguin and Pinecone too! And I think these turned out great!

I ended our activity with a quick recap of our senses!

The possibilities are endless!

These little rock penguins were super fun! We did some role play after they dried. Paint some more and use them for counting, one-to-one correspondence practice, non-standard units of measure, Paint some pinecones and use them in combination with penguins for adding/subtracting, create a tic-tac-toe set