I am the walrus?

Well, I'm getting behind on my blogging, as usual. But I do want to report on what we've been doing! I've been worse and worse at making time for "school" as our vacation and DB's actual school gets closer and we are so busy. But our large-ocean-animal week was fairly successful, so I'll report on that.

This week (which was a couple of weeks ago) we focused on sharks, dolphins, walruses, penguins, and manatees--basically all the stuff I planned on seeing at Sea World on our field trip (we have passes--thanks Mom and Dad!). As usual, we checked out a bunch of nonfiction books from the library and had a few fiction-y ones on loan from my mom ("Tooth Trouble" was cute, and a good one for preparing to go to the dentist). We did some reading and rhyming, and a little bit of writing (I've been bad about practicing writing :(--he's going to forget all his lower case by the time kindergarten rolls around! Oh well).

And we did some projects: We made penguin costumes. OK: I did. (It was a hard morning to begin with, and the costumes were a bit under-appreciated. But I got a cute picture out of it.)

We made a sand/shell collage with sea critter drawings.

And I bought some diving toys shaped like some of our animals for a day the kids went swimming (DB's learning to dive for stuff).

A couple of our activities were also our snacks. We tasted nori (dried seaweed--"this is what manatees eat!")--but I knew they wouldn't like it. So we made fruit makizushi--that's a sushi roll. Only we used fruit roll-ups, rice prepared with coconut milk and sugar (I think--I can't find the recipe now), and fruit in the middle. They failed because my rice was too soupy--I forgot to refrigerate it--and the fruit roll-ups were super sticky--I should have used wax paper between the rolling mat and the roll. But they tasted really yummy!

We also made peanut butter balls (no-bake) and rolled them in coconut to make "snowballs." We ate "boats" for lunch one day--peppers with tuna inside.

And had shark-shaped fruit snacks for bribes, of course.

For movies we watched parts of March of the Penguins (it was a bit long), A Shark's Tale, and Atlantis. Free Willy was another one we could have watched (I'm saving some of the other fishy ones like Nemo for when we study fish, maybe in the fall).

Then we had our field trip! I really like Sea World--the vast majority of the population won't ever get this close to these animals in the world--aquariums are not rich enough to house them--and I really think it helps a species to have publicity and interaction. I never realized how obviously intelligent dolphins are, for instance, until I saw them interacting with people from inside their tank.

You could do a whole unit just on their Arctic area, which is really a transporting experience all on its own. I love the beluga whales--they look like moving, floating marble sculptures.

So beautiful. We got a really good looks at a GIANT walrus this time too.

And found out from our books that it isn't unusual--they just look like that~! The thing was at least 15-20 feet long, body the girth of a redwood, with a little pinhead. Weird creature.

No more manatees, though. They got shipped back to Florida. Pity. CN got a great pic with her idol, Elmo, though. She couldn't WAIT to see him, and when she did, she couldn't stop hugging him! Or rather, she stood there solemnly, all snuggled into him, until it was time to go. And she went happily, satisfied. Cookie Monster tried in vain to get her attention!

So that was our ocean week. Next time: a trip to the rainforest.