Beach

Beach Lessons

Here is  a picture of our Morning Table. It is about a a habitat: the beach! Here we explore these questions:

What lives on the beach? 

How might tides impact habitat?

Here's a song we made up together about visiting the beach: https://youtu.be/V0DtjOEeS_Y

Activity for Age 4: Fish puzzle. Match the shapes. Match the word. Make a rhythm like waves 

Activity for Age 6: Crab puzzle. Match the shapes and word. Answer a question about high tide and low tide. Move around the paper cutouts to see that more rocks are exposed at low tide.

This table setup feels busier than usual. Normally I would split the contents of each mat into two separate days. But today I wanted to show a crab living in the midst of the rocks at low tide (tide pools) and the fish living in the water, and this seemed to be the best way. Each child has some matching to do with the words and shapes, and they also have to read a sentence or two and act on it. 

California Tidepools

Do you want to know a little more about the crabs who live in tide pools? Here's a link. 

http://californiatidepools.com/crabs-and-lobsters/

My parents took me often to see the tide pools since I grew up in California. Now we live in Florida and here the beaches are different, but there are plenty of rocks along the sea wall that are home to fun critters. Here is a photo of the girls playing and exploring on the beach.

Florida Beaches

Want to know what the beaches and seashores are like here in Florida? I absolutely love the descriptions of beaches found in this piece by Visit Florida. https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/things-to-do/outdoors-nature/types-of-beaches-shorelines-florida.html

Shell Math

Here's some math we did with shells the other day.

Our 4 year old loves doing addition problems with shells. They're fun to hold and move around.

We made a whole blog post on math lessons that we like to do with shells. Here is a link. http://steamma.blogspot.com/2022/08/math-with-shells.html

Beach Stories

Would you like to hear a silly story that takes place at the beach? 

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Shell:

https://youtu.be/zkY8_KZCAbw

How about a book that talks about our senses during a visit to the ocean? We read it in English and in Spanish.

Hello Ocean

https://youtu.be/F7L93dyEQJE

Hola Mar

https://youtu.be/9PYuUeNWV70

10 Little Activities

Here are 10 simple activities we can do at the beach!

1) What birds do you see? Let's count! Can we identify them with our birding book?

2) How many different types of shells can you find? Let's learn their names and trace their shapes in the sand.

3) Can you make a perfect sphere out of sand?

4) What is the frequency of the ocean's waves? (Count the seconds between crashes)

5) Count the ships! 

6) Search for buried treasure (I buried something for them to find when they weren't looking).

7) Bring your watercolors and paint the horizon.

8) Is it high tide or low tide? Let's look at the compaction and moisture of the sand and the stripes of sea weed on the shore as clues.

9) Can you feel the sand and water with your toes or fingers? Let's describe how it feels. 

10) Let's look at the grains of sand. Did you bring a sifter? I bet we can find some small shells in the sand!

 #weareproblemsolvers

Beach Art

We love this salt dough activity that our friends at The Barefoot Homeschooling Mon put together.

They made designs by pressing found shells into the dough!

Here is a link to the blog post where they share their recipe and process:

https://thebarefoothomeschoolingmom.blogspot.com/2020/05/nature-print-salt-dough-ornaments.html