Let's name the zones of the open sea...

 

It's Ocean Week! Not to age myself or anything but when I was learning about geography in grade school there were four major oceans; Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Indian. Of course, back then we still had nine planets too, sorry Pluto. 😂 Sometime about 1999 we apparently got a fifth one -- the Southern Ocean. This threw a tiny wrench in my plans to have us focus on one ocean per day this week. We have a little field trip on Friday so we won't be focusing on anything specific that day. To fix this problem we lumped the Arctic and Southern Oceans together for today since they have similar climates. They don't have similar inhabitants though and Evie was SHOOK this morning to find out that penguins actually do not live in the same place as polar bears. At any rate this morning her sensory activity involved getting all her arctic animals out of a block of ice.



 

This took her about 45 minutes with multiple refills of warm water and some tools. She loved it though and stuck it out until all the creatures were free. While she worked to free them we talked about how climate change is affecting the ice where these animals live and how important it is that we do what we can to change that. When we talked about the planets during Space Week we talked a lot about how things that affect one part of our planet affect everyone on it so this was a good extension of that topic.







We also made a little paper tear penguin today for some art. While she made her penguin we discussed how the features a penguin has can help him to thrive in the climate he lives in. We also looked at some other animals to see what traits they share and what makes them a little different.








We ended the day with a brief discussion about bioluminescence. Evie is actually a bit familiar with this topic and as soon as I said it she said "Like in Moana!" 😂


After we talked about what it is and why it helps creatures who live in the deep parts of the oceans we had a fun glow bath to get the point across. ;)




Stay tuned to see what we get into for the rest of ocean week. :)

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