On Monday we realized that many animals disappear over the winter months. Some animals migrate to escape the cold! We played a monarch migration board game, and got to take home some milk weed seed pods to help facilitate the migration of our local butterflies next year. And it isn’t just winged animals that migrate! We pretended we were in the mountains and reenacted an Elk migration, too!
Other animals disappear in the winter because they hibernate. Before these creatures cozy up for the winter, they often need to fatten up to store energy for their big snooze. We acted out fattening up with t-shirt layers and then we made some caves and dens to pretend to hibernate in! We also learned where cold-blooded animals go when they disappear for the cold weather. We learned that reptiles and amphibians hibernate in the ground- often under leaves and mud. We got to act out their hibernation with dirt dessert pudding complete with gummi frogs and snakes- yum! We wrapped up the day with imagining and illustrating ourselves as animals choosing if we would choose to hibernate or to migrate and explaining why.
