Teddy has always been fascinated by the ocean and its creatures. I am not sure if it was because we live close to the sea and have been going to the beach since he was a little baby and instead of visiting a zoo we have been taking him to a local sea centre or because that one of the first 'big boy' books we read was my old encyclopedia, the life in the ocean.
Since then his favourite animals are currently a deep sea angler fish, a manta ray, plaice fish and of course whales!
As his curiosity increased and his constant questions got more specific I have decided it might be the right time to try out some activities such as Ocean Layers as shared with you below. He loved it!
Ocean Layers
This topic wasn't new to him we were already talking about the the layers of the Ocean and the various fish that inhabit them. As already mentioned, his favourites were the angler fish which lure their prey in the deep murky waters and also the sea turtles who love the clear and sunlit waters.
I never want to overwhelm him with information but at the same time I like to tell him as things are and when I see his keen little face when I read him some new facts and more importantly his unbelievable capacity to retain those facts and talk about them even months after, I feel even more encouraged that the approach I've assumed has been the right one for us.
So lets have a look at those layers!!
if you'd like to try these activities all you need for the first part:
- large paper (we used A3)
- some paint (we used brown, blue and white to help make different shades of blue) - all our paint is from the ELC - children friendly and washable - Early Learning Centre
- paint brush
- and some sea animals (we have most of our animals from schleich, mojo or collecta which can be purchased on Amazon or eBay and some wooden ones which were made especially for Teddy by my talented friend Alexandra from Suvy z drivi, you can see some of here beautiful work on here: Suvy z drivi (Wooden craft)
and for the second part:
- 5 glass jars or plastic containers
- water
- and some food colouring
- you can add animals or labels to each jar
we have read and named the five zones of the ocean (sunlight, twilight, midnight, abyss and trenches)
so we have decided firstly to draw them together and then we tried to place all of our sea animal to their rightful place.
It was loads of fun but I though it might not really give him the idea and understanding so we decided to make the layers using glass jars!
we found five similar in size jars (most of them are from our favourite olives), Teddy filled them with water all the way to the rim and then we used blue food colouring to colour the water. We started with the lightest one, adding more and more in each one.
we use again some of our animals which were small enough to fit in and placed them inside the zone they would live in in the ocean and then was time to layer them out!
If you'd like to do this at home I would recommend you to use smaller and wider jars like our trenches' jar (jar from salsa sauce) or even plastic tupperware as we found it bit tricky to stack them all the way to the top but Teddy did brilliantly supporting the 'tower' and I believe that seeing them like this has given him much better understanding.
We still have the jars and he likes to look at them and place them in an order and adding more animal to them.
Here are some of our favourite books about the ocean, the seashore and its animals:
these are the 'ancient' books that belonged to me as a child and I believe have sparked his interest in the ocean. They are written in Czech (we are rising Teddy bilingually)
These books are fab! both interactive, the secret of the seashore is a shine a light book (you need to place it in front of a light to see which animal is hiding there. We love reading it when its getting darker and Teddy can shine a torch from behind the page, you can get it here: Secrets of sea shore
and under the Ocean is a 3D book looking at what is happening above the water and what lies beneath! very cleverly done! you can get it here: Under the ocean
These 3 are from Nature story series, they are really great. Beautiful and realistic pictures and they are written like a story to get children interested but they are based on the real facts
And this treasure - Animalium - welcome to the museum, it covers all kind of animals, but we just LOVE it!
you can get it on here: Animalium
If you like what we do you can follow us on Facebook for more activities and fun experiments!
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