Fun fact! Did you know once a year, penguins lose all their feathers in a ‘catastrophic moult’?
There are 17 species of penguin with their heights ranging from the emperor penguin, which is up to 130cm tall, to the little blue penguin found off the coast of Australia that is a mere 30–35cm in height. Celebrate Penguin Awareness Day (20 January) by exploring height through penguins.
Read on for penguin height activity instructions, STEM learnings and extension activities. Don’t forget to share your STEM explorations with us! Join Little Scientists’ Facebook group “Early STEM Educators Network” to exchange STEM ideas with educators all over Australia.
You will need:
📏A tape measure or height chart.
🐧A list of penguins and their heights
Optional: Some cardboard cut-outs or life-sized outlines of penguins to put in order
What penguin are you? Support your children to measure their heights and compare them to the heights of the different penguin species.
Penguin Height List:
- Emperor penguin 110–130cm
- King penguin 95cm
- Gentoo penguin 71cm
- Chinstrap 76cm
- Macaroni 71cm
- Galapagos penguin 49–53cm
- Little penguin 30–35cm
🦕 Educators can compare their heights to penguins too! Fossil records indicate that there were once mega penguins that grew up to 2m tall!
What’s the STEM?
📏 Measuring and recording heights, the children learn skills that are important for scientific research such as using criteria for classification (such as height) as well as measuring using tools and documentation of their findings.
💬 They grow their STEM vocabulary, using language for observing, describing and comparing when talking about their own and the penguins’ heights. Some topical STEM vocabulary to introduce could be: height, centimetres, metres, taller, tallest, shorter, shortest.
🐒 Accurate descriptions are important when communicating during research and when presenting the results. You can use the story of the little monkey looking for his mum in Where’s my mom? to illustrate this and start a conversation with the children.
Extension Ideas
🐘 Continue with other animals. Create a height chart with children’s names and the names of animals. You could even add the children’s pets.
🐊 Taronga Zoo Sydney has a wonderful display with models of different penguins with which children can compare their heights.
For more fun penguin facts, check out this video:
Develop your STEM skills with pedagogy-based STEM PD:
- Browse our in-person STEM workshops.
- Browse our online STEM workshops.
- Browse our online STEM Hours.
- Book an in-service workshop for your team.
- Book a STEM Family Workshop for your families.
