Penguin Art (with a little geometry snuck in)

Many of you may know by now that I love penguins, especially the Tacky the Penguin series by Helen Lester.  We've been reading a bunch of our favorite penguin tales and having fun with a wintery theme at our house.

Mr. One brought this adorable art project home from kindergarten last week, and I knew I had to try a preschool-friendly one out with Mr. Two.

Look at the adorable snowflakes in the background.

Looking at it, I realized how many simple shapes were used to construct it, so I turned it into a geometry lesson as well as an art project.

Here's Mr. Two's version.

Adorable, no?

Here's what we did.

You will need:
One sheet of blue construction paper
One 8 1/2" by 3 1/2" black rectangle
One 5 1/2" by 2 1/2" white rectangle
One 4" diameter orange circle
One 2 1/2" by 2" black rectangle, cut on the diagonal to make two triangles
One orange triangle, with approximately 1" sides
Two white hole reinforcement stickers
cotton balls
glue or glue stick

I wanted to include a little scissor practice into the project, so I had Mr. Two fold the orange circle in half and cut down the fold, then with one half, I had him fold it in half again (making two quarters of a circle) and cut on the fold.  This made the feet.

We then went through assembling the penguin one shape at a time, starting with our two large rectangles for the body, then the quarter circle feet, the triangle wings and ending with the circle eyes and triangle beak.

The cutest thing about this project was when we got to the end of making the penguin, Mr. Two said, "We need an egg!"  We had just read The Emporer's Egg, and our picture was incomplete without an egg resting on our bird's feet.  We added a white oval egg.

The last step was gluing on some soft cotton ball snow around the bottom of the picture.

linking up at ABC's and 123's Show and Tell and at Delicious Ambiguity's Tot Tuesday