Ocean Exploration

On Monday during centers, we played a fun alphabet game. The letters of the alphabet were hidden around the room and the kids had to find them and put them in order. They did awesome! (The letter H did get skipped, but they figured out a pretty good solution.)

After that we talked about dolphins. We learned lots of interesting things about the way they communicate and learned about some dolphins who are training to be spies. They are using their echo-location to look for mines and other dangerous objects on the bottom of the oceans. Then the kids each got to make their own dolphin sun catcher!

On Wednesday we moved on to coral reefs. The kids were very concerned when I told them that coral were endangered and came up with a plan to stand on the beach and stop people who are going to throw garbage in the ocean or go out and touch the coral. It was so sweet!

I had several pictures of  different types of coral and had the kids guess what it might be called, based on what it looks like. They did a really good job! They got rice coral and finger coral on the first try.

On Friday we worked with numbers some more and learned a little more about adding. The kids put together a penguin and then answered a few questions about how many fish he had. We used the extra fish to practice adding!

And finally, we got to the part of the ocean that all the boys have been waiting for, the darkest depths. Throughout the month, every time they have had time to look at books, at least one boy, if not two or three have grabbed the Eyewitness Oceans book and turned to the pages that show the fish that live in the bottom of the ocean. They are some pretty crazy looking fish. We finally read those pages and talked about all the cool things these fish can do like glowing in the dark and eating other fish that are larger than themselves. Since these fish aren't cute and don't do much, they don't lend themselves well to many crafts or activities. So, we made a fish bowl with some pictures of the fish we had learned about! It was a good opportunity to review what we had learned.