Penguin Place Mats (sort of)

For our stART project (a weekly story + art link-up hosted by A Mommy's Adventures), I had the girls help me with a little more penguin party prep. We have a penguin birthday coming right up, but tomorrow is also National Penguin Awareness Day. This craft could work for either one.

To begin with, I laid out three long strips of freezer paper, that will serve as our party table cloth, with the waxy side down.

Then, in I drew a rough, egg shaped, penguin outline around a dinner plate, at each spot around the table.


Since I'm not sure whether we'll be eating our lunch on the "table cloth" or just our cake, I traced a circle for the penguins' white middles around a dessert plate. That way the penguins are large enough for dinner plates, but cake plates will be able to cover all their white middles.


Finally, the girls started coloring in the black part of the penguins, using the side of peeled crayons (penguins look very strange without their beaks, but trust me those are penguins).


I didn't want to tape the paper down to the table and risk tearing it when I went to roll it up before the party, so I placed books on top, to keep the sheets of paper from moving out of place as the girls moved around the table, coloring.




While they colored, I read Margret & H.A. Rey's Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World out loud. The story is about a penguin radio host, who sets off to see the world in hope of finding new stories to use on the air.

The children balked a little bit as his friends, Seal and Polar Bear, see Whiteback off on his journey. But, since the story begins and ends in fictional Penguinland, rather than Antarctica, and has an amusing refrain repeated throughout the story, that made them giggle, they decided to forgive the authors' mixing of North and South Pole creatures.

After the girls were done coloring, I rolled the papers up to keep them safe until the party, when I'll tape them down, and add beaks, feet, and forks (see it does look like a penguin).


It's great to be a homeschooler.