Living Under The Sea

I'll be writing my kindergarten wrap up for February pretty soon, but thought I would share a couple of the awesome projects we did during our study of Oceans and Marine Animals.

Our major project was making the three windows in our main living area into three different zones of the ocean.

The project itself was super simple. I taped blue cellophane (from the gift wrap section of the craft store) over the windows.

The Open Ocean: Moon jellies, a tiger shark, cod, tuna, and a skate.

For each zone we researched what animals would live in that zone and selected a handful to display in our "aquarium". I cut the appropriate general shape of each creature out of construction paper and taped it to the window. Brother-Bug helped decorate the cut-outs with crayons and markets. We labeled each creature with its common name.

The Continental Shelf (Coral Reef): Octopus, Moorish Idol Fish, Coral, Manta Ray, Anemones,Clown Fish.

I kept the creatures, colors, and shapes basic and simple because we are doing kindergarten. If we were a little older I might have found actual pictures of the creatures to cut out, or done more complete labels and descriptions... We could have made it a lot fancier and/or complicated; if we repeat this project in the future we probably will add some facets.

The Dark Zone: Female Angler Fish, Vampire Squid, Red Comb Jelly, Brittle Star, Deep-Sea Crab, Sun Star, Gulper Eel, Deep-Sea Urchins (Brother-Bug's favorite zone).

The best part was watching Brother-Bug explain the projects and zones to friends, identifying creatures as he went along each window. He also incorporated his new ballet moves into underwater dances of each creature. It was so fun and hands-on that he seemed to retain a lot of the information.

I wonder what else our windows could become?