Shark Day

I've decided I've gotten into too much of a rut with my homeschooling. I want to go back to doing tons of cool stuff, so I asked the kids what they wanted to learn about.

Leena said, "Sharks!" So in the line of the infamous Squid Day, we had Shark Day. This is Leena's picture.

We started off with some shark websites. We liked Enchanted Learning a lot. This shark page was free! This page had great pictures. I also found a page with lots of printables: a wordsearch, maze, shark anatomy sheet, and one graphing shark sizes.

After the websites we did a packet of those printables, then read some library books: an Eyewitness Shark book and another really great one I can't remember.

I pulled our shark jaw out of the museum so we could look at exactly how all those rows of teeth work. Since the jaw is cartilage, we talked quite a bit about the plusses and minuses of having your skeleton be cartilage or bone.

For one thing, sharks can't really move their fins, so they can't move backwards the way a fish can. Cartilage is just too weak to support moveable fins. On the other hand, a cartilage skeleton is quite flexible and sharks can turn around really quickly... so it's really not advisable to tease a shark about not being able to swim backwards.



We moved on to an art project. My plan was to have the kids draw sharks participating in the food chain. The idea was to have them draw the animals in heavy crayon and then do a watercolor wash for the water. They had so much fun, they never got around to the wash. Here we have sharks feasting on luminescent squid.




That was the morning, and the rest of the day was spent Down by the Bay, collecting shark's teeth! I wish I had brought my camera for the actual collection.

It was the perfect day to go: too warm to be standing around turns into just perfect when you cool water lapping at your ankles! It was too early in the season for biting flies and jellyfish, and the beach wasn't crowded.

Best of all, everyone found plenty of teeth!