Preschool- Oceans

So Ollie and I have been focusing on oceans. More specifically, what lives in them. He has really loved this study. He can now tell you which shark is the largest, how an octopus protects itself, and many fun facts about the starfish along with several other fun tidbits of knowledge. He is such a smart boy!

One of the most important factors in our adventures is our information. We love our local library and get many great books there. They have a ton about oceans. We also use the internet a bunch. There is so much information! It is a lifesaver when Ollie asks a question that I don't know the answer to.

After our adventures with preschool co-op, we started by studying octopuses. We read up on them quite a bit. Ollie was fascinated by the way they escape prey--hiding, running or spewing ink. He was also interested to discover that an octopus's mouth is inbetween all of his tentacles. We made an octopus by stuffing an old sock with plastic bags, then tying a string under them and cutting the "leg" of the sock into 8 pieces, such a great exercise in counting! Here he is with his octopus. Of course it was swimming so it's a bit blurry!

 After discovering many tantalizing starfish facts and watching one eat a calm, both boys got the opportunity to use their senses and create a bumpy starfish. They simply glued raw oatmeal to a star I cut out of paper. It was a bit messy but it was fun! This activity and the next one came from the book "Kitchen Table Play and Learn."

Here I drew an underwater scene in white crayon on white paper. Ollie then painted it with watercolors to discover what animals were there. I do say, if you do this, be sure to really color your picture in thoroughly or they won't be able to tell what is there. Ollie did enjoy this but kept telling me that the shark was a dinosaur. I guess my artistic ability has never been fabulous!

I borrowed this idea from a great little blog that I love called Discovery Days and Montessori Moments.  She recently had her child create a winter scene with little plastic animals and white playdoh. I had Ollie create an underwater scene with some plastic sea animals and blue playdoh. He enjoyed this and it morphed into a long fun experience. Not only did he create a scene but he hid them in the dough, he made prints with them and he decided to make an urchin as well. We played for probably an hour. Our sea creatures interacted and it was quite amusing. 

Finally, We did a shark activity. I cut out different sharks to scale  and had ollie arrange them on his paper from biggest to smallest. I randomly picked 5 but I did make sure to include the very biggest which is the whale shark. The whale shark can reach nearly 50ft! That's 30 ft more than a Great White Shark.To make them to scale I simply drew them at half the cm. So since the whale shark reaches 50 ft, I drew him at 25 cm.  I did not get a picture which is probably ok since I am not a artist but they passed as sharks!