Project 129: Life in the Oceans

This week's project was inspired by both Project 127: Biomes and this week's #LiveLent reflection. We had previously done a project on the oceans back in Solomon's first year of home education, so it seemed a good time to revisit the topic again (see Project 27: Under the Sea).

The children followed the BBC Live Lesson and worksheets on the Blue Planet,plastic pollution, and sustainable fishing, and watched some episodes of Blue Planet on Netflix. They also watched Finding Dory and made use of the Finding Dory educators guides on the Walt Disney nature site.

The children were also expected to make use of resources in the house to create their own fact sheets about an underwater creature of their choice. Solomon picked the whitetip reef shark and Monica the (freshwater) tucuxi dolphin.

Some of the worksheets and fact sheets

Finally they made their own jelly fish pictures using toilet tissue and wool.

Toilet tissue jelly fish

Next project: Easter III

Project 27: Under the Sea

This week's project was designed to coincide with the Norwich Puppet Theatre home education workshop, which was themed 'Under the Sea'. This was the third workshop Solomon has attended, and he enjoys it every time (see also Ancient Egypt and Puppets and the Theatre).

Solomon's Under the Sea Creature

We started the week with an overview of the seas and oceans and underwater life from his encyclopaedia, and then looked more closely at coral reefs, the deep ocean, and shipwrecks. There are plenty of online resources for the oceans, from the BBC's What is an Ocean Habitat  to Google's 'Streetview' of the Great Barrier Reef, and a nice video on how deep the oceans are:

We also watched the first episode of the Blue Planet (available on Netflix) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (DVD).

Finally we finished the week with the Under Pressure experiment from Usborne's 100 Science Experiments book. When the bottle is squeezed the air bubble inside the pen lid is compressed and the diver sinks, and then rises again when you let go:

Next week's project: Dinosaurs!