Antarctica ::Week 2::

We continued on our journey to the bottom of the Earth this past week – all of us absorbing MUCH more information and having a great time exploring a continent that we didn’t think would be all that exciting! Just today (Sunday) I found some more great links and asked the girls what they would like to do next week and had a very loud: MORE SHACKLETON!! So we’ll be spending a few more days in Antarctica it seems and then moving on to a unit study on penguins for the oldest three.

I will be sharing a ton of the great links that we’ve been using this last week at the end of the post, so be sure to check them out. It is by no means a complete collection, but there are guaranteed to be some great helps for you in the list.

Here’s a look into how our week worked out:

Monday

• Reviewed some of our studies from last week (Antarctica is the 5th largest continent, 99% ice, coldest and windiest continent)
• Continued on our virtual field trip…which led us off on several fun bunny trails
• Started learning about Shackleton, an explorer to Antarctica
• Watched some fun clips on the Southern lights and talked about what causes them. This was our favorite clip.

• played “name that hemisphere” and talked about what hemispheres that Antarctica is in: south, east and west

Tuesday

• Learned more about the animals in Antarctica and watched a movie from National Geographic (which ended up being more of a “snooze-fest” for a certain younger student)

Wednesday

• Learned about different types of plant life in Antarctica: lichen, moss and alga
• Talked about why so few plants grow in Antarctica
• Learned why plants around Antarctica grow better in the ocean than on Antarctica

Thursday

• Talked about the different men that have attempted to explore and have succeeded in first exploring Antarctica: Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton.
• Traced the routes of Amundsen and Scott and compared their different journeys to the South Pole (who was successful, who wasn’t, how they compared to each other)
• Wrote fictional journal entries from the point of view of Amundsen (the first to reach the South Pole). These were hysterical!!

Here is Laurianna’s fictional journal entry:

“I won the race! I can’t wait to return home. I hope Scott found the tent and the letter. We had to kill a lot of the dogs for our trip back home.”

And McKenna’s entry (apparently left at the tent for Scott to find when he arrived behind Amundsen – spelling is her’s):

“I won the race! I’m very happy that I did. You were vary nise. I saw a pengwin today.”

Here are some of the wonderful links that we used this week in our studies:

• Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears – great online K – 5 magazine that provides lesson plans and much more for kids and teachers. This link is specifically to their magazine archive.
• Lesson plan on auroras (and oh.my.word a ton of activities that you can do and spend all week long on – but we didn’t. Also from Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears
• Time lapse video of Antarctica (over the period of a year)
• Nova Online – companion site to program “Warning on the Ice”
• Amundsen’s journey to the South Pole – fictional article written to tell story of Amundsen’s journey to South Pole
• Timeline index of explorers
• Antarctica explorers – talks about the four most prominent explorers
• South Pole.com – has some great pictures of old letters and is a site dedicated to the heroic explorers of the Antarctic area

Our trip will continue next week, so be sure to check back to see more about our studies on Shackleton. We are having so much fun with this study. If you would like more info on Antarctica and links, be sure to check out my first post of our studies, To the Bottom of the Earth: Antarctica for Kids ::Week 1::.