The last of our ocean theme

After writing the last post, I realized I had done more than I thought with ocean week,  but still it wasn't nearly what I really wanted to do.  There are a lot of very cool sensory activities I could have set up, but with Keira around, and being so mouthy still, it isn't a good idea because of chocking hazards.  I did however, set up this simple ocean bin mainly for Alli.  She of course had fun with it, and spent quite a lot of time adding water 

Then when it was nice and dirty looking, she set about to play

                Meanwhile Keira stole the hose to drink out of

I struggled with whether or not to make a rice bin for a long time, but finally just went ahead and did it.  You will notice it is small, rather than the larger plastic bins I usually use.  Since we have a history of not keeping the rice tidy, I decided smaller was better.  Emily is really good with it, and for the most part can keep it in the bin, Alli of course cannot, and takes great pleasure in dropping rice by the scoopful while standing on top of the table and watching it fall.  Unfortunately we cant do these activities outside anymore because of a rodent issue under our deck (mountain living problems).  So I have to sacrifice my house, and plan on a thorough vacuuming anytime we do these bins.  It's worth it though.  

You can't really tell, but this is our ocean bin.  The rice is blue of course, but there are shells, and ocean animals in there, they just seem to be buried at the moment.  

We went several days without being able to do anything, and then last Saturday I woke up a little early, and set up some trays.  Of course as soon as Emily came wandering out she wanted to get started so here we are 8 am learning about buoyancy and salt/ocean water vs. regular water.   

The whole family participated in this one.

                           Our salt water and regular water

                  Putting in the eggs, she was a little scared, because I told her to be careful and not drop the egg in hard so it wouldn't break

You can see the first attempt at egg floating didn't work, we didn't have enough salt, but fortunately Alli took care of that problem.  

                                             Success!

Our next project was making the ocean in a bottle.   

            We added some water, oil, sand, and ocean animals...

 Then we added blue liquid watercolors, and this was our mistake.  Both girls wanted to add it, and so we ended up with too much blue.  It was way to dark to see much, and Matt had to do a little adjusting to make it lighter.

Even after pouring out some of the water and adding new it was still dark, so we put it in front of a flashlight to see through it.  Alli wanted the steal the flashlight of course.  :)   

Anyway, I was pretty impressed with this experiment.  But because we spent so much time trying to lighten it up so we could see the ocean, the girls lost interest.  It's too bad, because I really wanted to show them the waves, and talk about 

Alli decided to go back to our salt water experiment and play with the eggs.  She especially enjoyed cracking the egg and playing with the yoke.  I let her play for awhile, until crazy egg hands started threatening to touch everything.

Took a detour to the river to play in sand, make an Elsa cake, and watch crazy kids play in the freezing cold water on a freezing cold day.  

                                     Eating some mud...

We read the Rainbow Fish story and did the felt board to go along with it.  

 Then tried again with the Do a Dot markers but they must taste awfully good, because Keira can't seem to keep them out of her mouth.  She looked like the Incredible Hulk with her green lips which unfortunately I didn't get a picture of.

And just when I thought ocean week was fizzling out, we made a very spontaneous trip to the local aquarium.  This time Emily was brave enough to actually pet the shark!  Keira wanted to, but alas her little arms would not allow for that.  Maybe next year.  :)

Keira loved the tidepools!  

                      Keria trying to steal a hermit crab.  

The girl who loves water was very timid about touching the sea life.  But finally got brave enough to pet this starfish.  

                Some intense investigating going on at the ocean table.

 Playing with our Squiggs which I thought were pretty cool, and reminded me of octopus arms.

                                 

                          Playing our alphabet fishing game.

 Before I put it away, I let Keira loose with the rice bin, while the girls were at school.  She had so much fun.  And it was funny watching her trying to scoop rice.  She kept sticking the cup on top of the rice and expecting it to be in the cup when she took it out lol!  She finally tried putting rice in it with her hands, but that wasn't terribly accurate.  

It's night time so the lighting is terrible, but Emily is doing a simple math work sheet in which you need to add 2 numbers in order to find out which fish to color.  We used pens and various art supplies on the table to help her count.  Eventually she caught on that the numbers were going in order, so by the time we hit eleven and twelve, she didn't bother counting since she knew those would be the next two numbers lol!  

Yay!  I finally got Alli to participate (very briefly) in doing some puzzles.  Actually she put about 10 together before she got bored.  

One more worksheet finding the differences in each line.  I actually wouldn't bother with the worksheets but she loves them, so I keep printing them for her.

       Taking the ocean bin for one last spin before the bugs and                 butterflies move in which is our next theme.  

And finally that concludes ocean week!  Which was a grand total of 3 weeks, because I needed an extra week to gather all the bug and butterfly supplies.   We are deep into our first week in that theme, which hopefully won't take me as long to post about as ocean week did.  Sheesh!