Learning About Oceans

When we were away at Easter at the coast, the girls were playing in the sea and Eve was talking about the Atlantic Ocean (I think she has picked it up from watching nature programmes). This week I pulled together a few things from various sources and we had our first attempt at lap booking!

I used pages from homeschoolfreestuff from their Ocean lapbook file, as well as pieces from myhomeschooleducation's Ocean lapbook which is based upon content from the Temperate Ocean pages of mbgnet. We made a spinning book with the names of the five main oceans in each section, a fan book with different creatures that were dependent upon the sea, and a layer book showing the three light zones.

We talked about what makes the ocean blue..... Eve's response was that it looked blue because it had blue bits in. Whilst not scientifically accurate as an explanation, I knew that she knew what she was talking about! We talked about how light that appears clear splits into it's different colours when seen through rain drops as in a rainbow. I then made the point about why we see an orange pencil as orange (it reflects the colours that make orange) and why we see grass as green (it reflects the colours that make up orange). This led to Eve stating that the sea looked blue because it reflected blue. Great!

We talked about waves, and to be able to see them when we weren't at the seaside we made up an ocean bottle following the instructions here. Eve tipped the bottle backwards and forwards and watched the waves rolling across the surface. She even made some breakers! We talked about the surface of the ocean (the oil) being the section that moved. To demonstrate we lined up five marbles then rolled another into the end of the line, and Eve observed that only the marble at the other end of the line moved. We then added some sequins to the ocean bottle and made waves again and we could see that the sequins stayed more or less where they were, without moving from one end of the bottle to the other. We finished up by talking about how the waves in the bottle were made (by us) and how the waves in the sea were made (by the wind). I reminded her about the wind turbines we had seen and how we had talked about how much energy the wind had, and how it could make really big waves.

When we talked about the midnight zone at the bottom of the Ocean, Eve was taken with the idea of bioluminescence. We watched some You Tube clips of bioluminescent jellyfish, then Eve painted some with fluorescent paints whilst looking at a page of google images of them.

There is a lot more that we could do with Oceans...... I think that I would like to be better organised next time...... much of this was done day to day and i think that I'd like a better balance of practical activities next time round..... it's all a leaning process!