Fun Penguin Activities for National Penguin Awareness Day

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Learn all about these beautiful birds with penguin activities galore!

Now that Thanksgiving and Christmas have passed, winter might be starting to drag a little. Put a little more fun into your day with penguin activities, crafts, games, and snacks.

Yes, penguins.

Enjoy an entire day of celebrating penguins on National Penguin Awareness Day. Spend January 20 learning about penguins with games, snacks, and fun educational activities.

Celebrate Penguins with Games

• Play a penguin matching game to practice shapes and colors using a free printable found on Welcome to Mommyhood.
• Practice the ABCs with a penguin alphabet game using a free printable found on From ABCs to ACTs. As a bonus, your child will be able to practice their cutting skills, too!

Snack like a Penguin

• Since penguins like to eat fish, have fun with fish-shaped snacks before eating them.
• Build a yummy penguin-shaped snack using crackers, black olives, cream cheese, and carrot pieces as shown on Fantastic Fun and Learning.
• Create a penguin snack using bananas, chocolate, orange circle candy, and candy eyes, found on Momma Told Me. If you don’t have any candy eyes, use chocolate chips or something similar.

Fun Penguin Crafts

• Build a penguin out of craft sticks with a noodle bow tie as seen on Crafty Morning.
• Make a footprint penguin as found on Free Kids Crafts. It’s perfect to use as an art piece or to make fun winter cards.
• Use a toilet paper tube to DIY a fun penguin as seen on Easy Peasy and Fun.
• One Little Project shows you how to build a penguin out of an egg carton.
• Make a penguin using a paper plate as seen on Free Kids Crafts.
• Valentine’s Day cards have never been cuter! Use heart shapes to create sweet penguin cards as seen on The Spruce. Plus, you’re ready to send your love on Valentine’s Day!
• Use cotton balls to build a penguin as seen on Glued To My Crafts.
• Build a penguin out of your child’s handprints on Crafty Morning. If you don’t have foam for the handprint feet, you could use orange construction paper instead.

Penguin Activities

• Watch a penguin movie. We love Happy Feet and March of the Penguins.
• Help your child understand just how large different species of penguins are. You can find penguin height information on Cool Antarctica. You can follow the ideas on From the Hive, and actually draw lifesize penguins. Or use a tape measure to just mark each penguin’s height to compare to your child. Talk about what you notice!

• Read books about penguins. The Measured Mom has a great list of fun penguin books that you can pull from.
• Pretend to be a rockhopper penguin hopping with feet together from “rock” to “rock” (paper, pillows, or plates laid out on the ground). Then, have fun hopping, jumping, and skipping on your “rocks.”

• Tape a large line across your floor and try to waddle like a penguin on the line. Since penguins lay eggs, make it even more challenging by having your child hold a spoon with an egg (either hard boiled or plastic) as he or she waddles from one side of the line to the other.
• Did you know that you will never find polar bears and penguins together in the wild? Penguins are only found wild in the Southern hemisphere of the world, whereas polar bears are only found in the Northern hemisphere. Use the resources at International Penguin Conservation Work Group to visualize where penguins live. Then see if you can find those same locations on your own map. You could even pull up pictures of penguins in the wild around the world!

What other fun projects do you recommend to celebrate penguins?