Water at the bottom of the ocean, part 2

Today was the end of our third week in our ocean unit and it looks like we'll be at it for at least another week, maybe longer. Z-Man is currently doing some research for a report on the giant squid. Since this is his first official written report, I wanted it to be a high interest topic for him so I let him choose whatever sea creature he wanted. He painstakingly made out a list of 27 creatures and then began the laborious process of narrowing it down. Ha! I had foolishly thought the topic would be chosen and research would begin on the same day! Silly me.

We did some fun projects this week too. One is a whale pocket guide a teacher friend gave me. We have some excellent pocket guides on birds, trees and wild flowers that we can take on nature walks but it never occurred to me that we should have been bringing one for whales. Thankfully, this oversight has now been corrected.

I do not consider myself craft challenged, but the 3-layer ocean bingo game almost got the best of me. It is hard to put together. But it is cool! Very cool. And we all enjoyed playing it. So it was probably worth it, but proceed at your own risk.

And speaking of the midnight zone, there are some pretty frightening creatures down there! This project focused on some of the bioluminescent fish (and one mollusk) so we used glow-in-the-dark fabric paint where they light up in real life. I wish I could get a picture showing how they glow but you'll just have to take my word for it.

Z-Man enjoyed this book on the first-ever manned deep sea dive - way back in 1934!

We also made a wave bottle and read What is a wave? (A Just ask book)

One of the easiest things I did turned out to be one that the boys most looked forward to each day. Each day I put a new sea creature on my computer desktop. There is a huge choice of beautiful photos here. After one day of bad attitudes*, I came downstairs the next morning and found that Mark had put this on my screen:

The rare and elusive Big Daddy Sea Turtle - ooooooh, he's a beauty!

Stuff we watched:

Some great videos and webcams at the Monteray Bay Aquarium site.

National Geographic's Really Wild Animals: Deep Sea Dive [VHS]
The Living Sea (Large Format)

And that had better wrap up this post! See you again soon!

*Yeah, we have them. I just don't blog about them. Trying to be positive and encouraging here. Just like K-Love.