Winter Aistear

As typical winter weather is snowy, our Winter Aistear theme was 'Polar Regions'.  

🌎Polar regions are the areas of the globe that are furthest away from the sun and therefore extremely cold! It is very snowy in these regions.⛄

In our small world area for Aistear, we used a polar regions snowy back-drop (above), miniature people and cut outs of polar animals to play with.

Ms. Fox even let us use her 'flour snow' when she was finished with it.

The role-play area was : Polar Explorers
Here, the children:

• made plans of where to explore
• noted what they discovered
• and mapped their journeys. 

They also took on the roles of some new animals that they learned about like the Beluga Whale, the Arctic Fox and the Arctic Hare.

Experiment station: The Fun Bit!

As we learned about the native animals of polar regions, we noticed something that the marine animals had in common......blubber!

What is blubber and why do marine animals have it?

Water temperature is much colder than land temperature. Blubber helps to keep marine animals warm when they're in water because it's an extra fat layer surrounding them.

Does blubber really work? 

We did an experiment to test if blubber works. We wrapped playdough around one finger (blubber) and left the other finger as normal. We submerged both fingers into a basin of iced water at the same time. Which finger will get colder first?

 You guessed it! The finger with no playdough (blubber) around it got coldest first! 

Blubber does work!

And water makes playdough turn to goo! 😝