Ocean Week II

 Painting an Octopus may not sound like much of a task, but our friends "dove" into the experience.



We used a simple picture of the creature and taped it to our easel for reference.



Our goal was two part: 1) paint a circle for the head, 2) paint eight tentacles

 More paint followed as we painted our palms and fingers (no thumbs) to make a funny little octopus with eight legs. We counted each one.

 

We glued two eyes on our hand-print octopi because we could see in our informational books that thatWe is the number of eyes a real octopus has.

At group time we read/sang a wonderful counting book filled with sea creature mommies and babies.

After reading about Sea Turtles, we measured (using our bodies) and taped off the area that would hold a Loggerhead Sea Turtle.



We counted off to see how many friends could ride on his back.

Impressive!





We discovered that a sea turtle egg is the shape of a ping pong ball, round, instead of oval like a bird egg.

We practiced our sign-language for three different Ocean animals.










A great recycling project used "bubble wrap" to create frothy ocean water.





It was a print-making project, the first one we've done this year.



















The best thing about making a print is pulling back the paper and seeing the surprise!

 

We added more prints with sea animal sponges.

The Ocean

The sensory table was filled with soft, cool sand this week. We hid and retrieved many different types and sizes of seashells. 

We counted sea creatures with Ms. Amy as we practiced our math skills. 

 

One of our favorite activities this week was following a three step process to create our own ocean bottles.    We used a wonderful little tool, a funnel, to help us get the ingredients inside our plastic water bottles.

 

 We added sand, shells & rocks, and then filled our bottles with blue water. We know that every ocean has a combination of these three things.

We enjoyed several projects at the art table this week.

 Easel paintings became ocean background for paper schools of fish.

Shark cut-outs were given triangle-shaped teeth (lots of them!), eyes and gills, after reading an informational book about Sharks.

Jellyfish were created from paper plates, streamers, paint and glue. They looked so colorful in our windows and now float above us from the ceiling, giving us an underwater feel.







Informational and fiction books were part of our week as we learned about the creatures of the sea.