We’ve got your January literacy lesson plans completed for the entire month. Yep, four entire weeks of content! If you’re new to Made For Me Literacy, you can read more about our program here. This month we’re talking All Things Penguins! Students will love assembling an easy art craft of a penguin, making a fun penguin cookie snack, and making fake snow!
4-Week Lesson Plans
If the thought of planning lessons for an entire month has you stressed, we’re here to help. Our newly added curriculum maps break down each month’s activities in a day-by-day format. Your daily lesson plans are laid out for you, making lesson plans once less thing to worry about.
Read-Alouds
Each month, we focus on four forms of literature. To help immerse students in the stories, we provide story map materials, adapted book pieces, and leveled comprehension assessments (both in a digital and printable format!)
This month’s texts include:
Penguins by Kate Riggs (free on Epic)
If You Were a Penguin by Florence and Wendell Minor
Penguin, Penguin Poem (provided in the download)
A Penguin Story by Antoinette Pars (also available on Kindle)
Anchor Charts
We LOVE anchor charts!! Our anchor charts are informative, yet easy to assemble. Many teachers even choose to laminate the anchor charts and add velcro, making them interactive and usable for years to come! As a bonus, we now provide a digital version of every anchor chart! These are perfect for busy teachers, distance learning, or for providing additional practice to help generalize the concepts being taught.
This month’s anchor charts include:
- Penguin Life Cycle: Is there anything cuter than a baby penguin? Students will love following along as a penguin grows from an egg to an adult penguin.
- Parts of a Penguin: Labeling a diagram is such an important skill for our students! Not only do students practice identifying the key vocabulary terms, it’s also a great opportunity to elicit language skills!
- If I Were a Penguin: One of our most popular anchor charts, students love the familiarity of our predictable sentence anchor charts!
- Can/Have/Are: This hands-on sorting anchor chart goes into the various traits of a penguin.
- Penguin Words: We use high quality stock photos for our real picture activities to help students generalize the vocabulary words.
Easy Art + Writing
We are obsessed with this month’s Easy Art craftivities! The best part of our easy art activities is that step-by-step visual directions are provided for every activity. Whether you are using this as a whole group activity, a para-led small group, or even an independent work activity, the streamlined, easy-to-follow directions help set you up for success.
This month’s crafts include:
- Let it Snow Penguin
- Label the Penguin Diagram
- Penguin Directed Drawings and Class Book (with writing prompts)
- Penguin Learning (with writing prompts),
- Puffy Paint Penguin
- All About Penguins flipbook (with writing prompts)
Centers & Digital PDFs
With 16 different math and ELA task boxes and file folders, instilling independence has never been easier! (Read more about how to set up and independent work station here). This unit also comes with 8 digital centers, which can be accessed as interactive PDFs and self-correcting Boom Cards!
This month’s skills include: penguin vocabulary, shape sorting, shape matching, beginning sounds, letter writing, ten frames counting, same and different, opposites, syllables, short e word families, ten frames 11-20, comparing numbers, fish subtraction, shape words, sight words, and short a CVC words.
Cut-And-Paste Worksheets
Theses cut-and-paste worksheets are so much more than just “busy work.” Each of these 16 activities contains 2 different levels of differentiation. So whether your students are working on matching pictures to pictures or they have mastered tasks without visual prompts, we’ve got something for all your learners.
While some teachers use these as scissor and glue practice, some teachers laminate these activities and add velcro, making them reusable for years to come! There’s no wrong way to use these worksheets! These skills mirror the task box and file folder skills, for even more hands-on practice!
Visual and Sensory Recipes
We love visual recipes! Not only are they super motivating for students, but they also provide opportunities to focus on so many important skills, such as following directions, counting, speech and language skills, math, science, and so much more!
This month’s penguin-themed recipes include:
- Fake Snow: with just 3 simple ingredients, this fake snow recipe is a hit among students and teachers alike! Just add penguin toys for tons of hands-on fun!
- Penguin Cookie: Okay, but is this not one of the most adorable snacks of all times? Plus, you cannot go wrong with anything involving Oreos, it’s just a fact.
- Blubber Experiment: Combining science and sensory? YES PLEASE! Students will love exploring the concept of blubber with this easy science experiment.
- Frozen Penguins: Another sensory win! Students will love exploring this chilly sensory bin as they seek to rescue the penguins from these icebergs!
Looking for more Penguin-Themed activities?
Did you know we post weekly freebies in our private MFML Facebook Group? Be sure to check out all the penguin greatness here!
From Our Community
We love featuring your photos on our blog posts and social media channels! Here are just a few of the wonderful teachers that made this post possible! Be sure to check out their Instagram accounts for more classroom inspiration! Use our hashtag #mfmlfeature for a chance to be featured on our channels!
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