Marine Life

Started the day with a review of last week's themes (evaporation and transportation). 

We created 3 different scenes for the girls so they could organize their transportation toys by place of travel. 

Air:

Used pillow stuffing for clouds.

Land:

My 18 month old was able to help decorate this scene using painters tape and a little guidance from me.

Sea:

 Didn't have any toy boats, so we made these out of shapes I cut from foam and some Popsicle sticks. 

We have been mentioning evaporation throughout the week. We connected the idea to our bathing suits drying in the sunlight, the residual water disappearing in our bathtub, and when "painting" with water. The girls enjoyed using paintbrushes dipped in water to "paint" their chalkboard.

 'A' kept checking back on her art, to watch evaporation make her watermarks disappear. 

Since we were talking about water, I brought out our water table and decided to explore some marine life ideas with the girls. 

The next two ideas came from this book:  http://www.amazon.com/Janice-VanCleaves-Play-about-Nature/dp/0471129402

 

We filled one balloon with some air and the other with a marble and discussed why the air filled balloon  would float and not the other. You can expand this to many different objects and conversations on density, water displacement, etc.

Since 'A' loves jellyfish, we turned her umbrella into one:

 I tied strings to the corners of the umbrella to represent the tentacles and the girls ran around the house trying to eat each other and me with their umbrella jellyfish.

 By opening and closing the umbrella, the girls saw how a jellyfish squeezes its body to push jets of water to help propel it forward. 

 We then made our own aquarium style jellyfish using a water bottle, plastic grocery bag and blue food coloring. This was inspired by http://bhoomplay.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/diy_jellyfish_eng/. Click the link for a full tutorial as well.

 Unfortunately, my pictures don't do it justice. It looks much cooler in person.

We then made a sensory box using a plastic storage box, some blue rice we had made months ago, and fake flowers that we painted to represent coral reef. 

  

This kept the girls' hands busy for a long while and me busy vacuuming when they were all done.

The instructions for the colored rice can be found here: http://pinkandgreenmama.blogspot.com/2009/07/rainbow-rice-is-twice-as-nice.html

Yay for carryover! While playing with the sensory ocean box, 'A' lifted the fake water and shouted, "It's evaporating!"