Animals in Winter: A Kindergarten Investigation

After our Bird Study, the kids started talking about the birds and how they would survive the winter. After reading The Night Tree and Stranger in the Woods, they started wondering about other animals and what they do in the winter! They knew bears hibernated and birds flew south but little else on the subject. So as they wondered I created experiences in our room to explore animals in the winter!

I knew that as they played and investigated and read the books, there would be a lot of inspiration for both fiction and informational writing so I made sure to provide materials for writing also.



Here they explored the tracks that animals leave behind. They explored with white play dough and toy animals with accurate footprints. To record what they noticed, they drew the animal, it’s footprint and labeled it.





We read books and watched videos about animals in winter and found out that they did three things! Hibernated, migrated, or adapted to the weather! We formed expert groups to dig a bit deeper and create a three dimensional mural in the hallway to show what they learned and that others could learn from.

Here is the Hibernating Team’s project:

Here is the Adaptation Team’s Project:

Here is the Migrating Team’s project:

To celebrate the end of our study, next week we are going to create bird feeders and put out food for the animals that live around our school!

Here are some other things that have been going on in our room!

Writing Winter Animal pattern books are helping the students see the correct spelling of sight words and give them practice with spelling them correctly, remembering to put spaces between words and tackling harder words by writing down the letters they hear when they say the word slowly.

We created paintings inspired by a favorite book...Owl Moon.



We created crystals by mixing Borax and hot water, then looked closer and recorded our observations.





We looked closer at snowflakes and created our own. They loved leaning about Snowflake Bentley and seeing the book he made of his photographs of snowflakes!





They created winter stories.







Here are some math experiences. We have been focusing on addition.

I told this friend that I still needed to add a plus and equal sign so she just made her own!



Here are some of the literacy experiences in our literacy area:

Slap it is always a favorite game. One friend says a sight word. The first to slap it on their side gets a point.





The gingerbread man game is basically hangman for sight words.



It has been a fun month! Stay tuned for more very soon! Our Kindness Ninjas have been doing some random acts of kindness that you will hear about soon!