Happy Groundhog's Day!

Nothing is more fun than telling the Legend of the Groundhog to a bunch of first graders. They are amazed that this little hairy rodent, correction......large hairy rodent is in charge of our weather! It's hysterical to hear their conversations to each other about if he did or didn't see his shadow and how that will affect the future.  I had to talk them down, reminding them that a legend is not equivalent to science. But they think it IS all very scientific. I don't know if they got it. At the very least they think groundhogs have some close family ties to  to Mother Nature!

Most of the kids predict an early Spring...I hope they're right!

We all started the day doing a groundhog play and making our "props" (i.e. cool, buck toothed rodent hats)
Everybody wanted to be the star of the show of course.  Luckily Addie's mom was my mother helper for the day and she had them just trade parts. Problem solved!  Then we made our predictions and wrote them down.  I told them the Groundhog is only accurate 80% of the time, he could still be wrong! So most of them went with his advice anyway.... You know kids and their animals.....:) Then we graphed our preditions on our giant class graph using little groundhog cutouts.  Yup, Spring won out.

Ricky the Rodent....I mean....Gregory the Groundhog!

Then we read all about the Legend of Groundhog's Day.  I forgot to show them the utube of Phil in Pennsylvania, but I'll do that tomorrow. It's fun to see the actual little guy popping out. I wonder how old that dude is by now... like 200?  He always looks very well fed, like a little portly for a rodent!

The Legend lives on.....



Today was a freezing day to go out and check out sun shadows! Ugh! But we did it anyways!

Then we made some cute little pop up groundhog puppets with the groundhog's "house" being a cut in half paper bag and the 2 predictions on either side. I found some cute songs that go along with spring is early, or 6 more weeks of winter so we attached those to the bag and got out our instruments and sang songs. Then I passed everybody out a tatoo for Groundhog's Day.  We just took those home to try them out.  

Groovy tatoos of the groundhog.

Then we wrote our predictions out. They were really cute.  We will have to wait and see who is right and who is wrong.  We talked about sun and shadows and how they are made.  We made little sunclocks and put a piece of red string around them. Then we made solar bracelets out of solar beads. We all went outside to check out the sun. It wasn't as cold as yesterday thanks goodness, it was only about 20 degrees though.
EEK! Super chilly. They also loved my little solar robot. We watched him walk around the playground. The kids would make a shadow over him and he would immediately stop. Then everybody would laugh. And they would hop out of the way so the sun could hit his solar cell and he'd start marching again.




I'm predicting I don't last much longer in these single digit temperatures! Ugh! Bring on the sun Mr. Groundhog!

 I found these very cute cupcakes in a magazine and I so wanted to bake some and make these too! But I was too lazy to do them. It is really the fault of my favorite show. It happened to be on last night and I get really glued to the t.v. when it comes on. (The Good Wife on CBS at 9:00). Oh well, maybe next year....

Aren't these just the cutest things?



Their hats turned out so cute too...


My kids really loved doing the fun Groundhog's Day activities.  I hope his prediction is right this year. I'm slowly beginning to tire of shoveling snow off my car. I'm missing the beaches of sunny California. And so I can hardly wait for an early Spring.  Happy Groundhog's Day!

Pop! Goes the Groundhog!