365 Penguins

On New Year’s Day, a family receives a penguin in the mail, and so unfolds the year, with one penguin arriving per day. The problems and penguins pile up, as they have to come up with solutions for housing, feeding, and keeping track of the ever-increasing number. The sender of the penguins is revealed on New Year’s Eve.

1.

Prior to reading the story, assess the students understanding of the calendar year.

• How many months do we have in a year?
• What are they called?
• How many days are in a whole year? Is it always the same?

Using a paged calendar, flip through the pages, noting the names of the months and how the days and weeks are arranged, as well as the names of the days of the week.

• What is the largest number that can appear in a calendar month?
• Are all months the same?
• How do people decide how many days go into a month?
• Approximately how many weeks are in each month?
• Approximately how many groups of seven is that?

2.

Share the book with your students, reading through the whole story.

3.

Revisit the story on another day, this time using a calendar frieze you have prepared (or had the students prepare). Take apart a calendar (these can be purchased from discount stores, printed off from various sites on the internet, or from templates within word processing programmes) and attach the months together one after another in a long frieze. Pin this up so everyone can see how the whole year of days, weeks, and months looks as a whole. Discuss what the students observe now that they are seeing the whole year at once. For some students, they may never have seen the year as a whole but rather as a calendar page at a time. A calendar presented this way provides students with an image of the whole so that you can begin to engage them in conversations about the fractions of a year.

4.

As you read the story, this time stop at various points to record how many days have passed (and therefore how many penguins are in the house) by having a student circle or cross out the days on the calendar in vivid. Discuss and record the interesting fractions as you go. For example, ask:

• At the end of January, they had received 31 of the 365 penguins. How do we write that as a fraction? That is about what an easier fraction is.
• When will they receive half the penguins? What day is halfway through the year? (Because it is an odd number, students will have to decide that it is half way through the 182nd day.)
• There are 12 months in the year; how many months in half a year? In a quarter and in a third? When will the year be about 3/4 finished?
• Describe where your birthday is as a fraction of the year. My birthday is in April, which is about 1/3 of the way through the year.
• How many penguins did they have on Christmas Day? What fraction of the whole was that?

5.

Investigate more calendar fractions by dividing the year into terms, seasons, the number of lunar cycles, etc. Talk about places in the world where the year is divided into halves: wet and dry seasons.

6.

Leave the frieze up in the class or put up a new “clean” one and track the passing of the year, number of days at school, seasons, etc., supporting students to develop a visual image of the year as a whole.