Underwater Animals Unit Study

These are some pictures of our Unit Study we did on Underwater Animals. I had them each choose an animal to do a research paper on. We did it in the form of "mini-books." I cut card stock paper into 4 equal pieces and stapled 2 of them with white paper in the middle. The older girls did more extensive research while the younger ones did more drawings. It was a lot of fun!

Another activity we did was "Blindfolded at Sea." We took 3 bins and filled them with something that resembled the "sea." One had a can of spinach to represent seaweed. Another was warm salt water and the last was some sand with sea shells. We didn't have sand handy, so we used baby oatmeal. It worked great. Then, we blindfolded them one at a time and brought them in to see if they could guess it just by feeling.

We also googled for some fun lapbooking ideas. You can see some of the stuff we did at 2 of my favorite websites: www.homeschoolshare.com/oceans and www.enchantedlearning.com

We also paid a field trip to a local Aquarium. We practiced drawing different underwater animals. They each wrote a poem about the ocean and the creatures that live there. We also had fun looking for videos on youtube.com The best one we saw was the octopus eating a shark. FASCINATING!

We also had a pretty long vocab/spelling list. They wrote creative fictional stories about sea creatures. We went to a Japanese Restaurant and ate some Calamari, sea weed salad, shrimp, sushi, etc. It was a lot of fun and they were surprised by what they liked and didn't like.

We learned many words in Spanish from this category. Kylee did an additional research paper on tides/currents/gravity. We did a bunch of experiments that we found on composition of salt water. Here is also a picture of the boys playing a game from D.T. called "A, B, Seas." We taught them a fun sea shell counting song and played some preschool games with them that we made, just for fun. Plus, a few other things. Gosh, I could go on and on. We had 2 weeks of LOTS OF FUN! Please feel free to post ideas that you have as we will probably do a couple days review on this unit at the end of the year and I am always looking for new ideas. Comments are also welcome.