When I started planning for how I was going to involve all students in our school in the Antarctic expedition, I talked to the teachers I work with. I was particularly curious as to how to make this impactful and meaningful for our youngest students. They don’t understand the distance to another state, let alone the idea of getting to Antarctica. The wonderful kindergarten teacher in our school suggested having the students guess what penguins sound like. I loved this idea, so I asked all of the students in the elementary grades to record what they thought penguins sounded like, while I made a video of them. Each student got to make their own video. Then, while I’m in Antarctica, I will record penguin sounds.
The students had a blast with this. Some of them made chicken noises, some of them had seen penguins (of a different kind than I will see) at the local zoo, and some of them just made silly sounds.
*Add on after the trip: The best part about this project was that one of the 2nd grade boys made the silliest sound when I was recording his penguin sound. I thought ‘oh, he’s just being silly,’ but his was the sound that most matched what the Adelie Penguins sounded like!
The students LOVED watching their videos and comparing them to the sounds of 4 different species of penguins. We then had the classes try to make the sounds after they heard the recordings. It was a class period full of laughter!
Car Full of Harmony 
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