We Find Seashells at the Seashore

When my nephew was visiting he really wanted to go to the beach to look for shells.  We took him to our favorite shelling beach.  As you can see, quantity is not the issue.

We, including the adults in the family, are trying to learn the scientific names of our local shells better.  Here is a selection of  what we found:

Florida pricklycockle (Trachycardium egmontianum)

Speckled tellin (Tellina listeri)

Common jingle shell (Anomia ephippium)

Lettered olive (Oliva sayana)

left:  Pear whelk (Busycotypus spiratus) right:  Atlantic kittenpaw ( Plicatula gibbosa)

Florida wormsnails (Vermicularia knorrii)

Our go to reference for all things we find on the beach is below. It's our favorite because it covers crazy stuff you find other than seashells like egg cases, beach trash, and seeds.   I used to keep it in my glove box.

I've shared this post at:

Adventures in Mommydom
Sun Scholars

Sunday Showcase

Free Fishing Notebook Printables

Family values are very important.  Every family has their most cherished principles.  If my husband and I sat down and made a list of our most important values I'm 100% certain his number one would be love of fishing.  He would make a concession if you loved lure fishing more than fly fishing but it's still not really deviating.

So you get the picture how important fishing is in our house.  We do a lot of fishing but our homeschool is lacking in creative writing.  I feel we don't try to do enough as well as older Toad finds it harder than it needs to be or he should.  So we need to spend more time on the subject.

Because of all this, I was really excited to get a new freebie today.  The Crafty Classroom is sharing some free fishing printables with nice graphics here.  The printables are all free but the page has lots of ads on it, FYI.  

I know we'll put them to good use as we can combine one of our most frequent, most favorite activities with one of our least!

Art Cart into Science Cart

This little cart used to be our art cart. I did a post here about where all the art supplies went.  I worked some magic on it and now it's our science cart.


I really like that it consolidates all our strewn out science equipment. The microscopes have not been getting enough use and I'm hoping having them more in view will inspire us.  I inherited the dissection scope and the compound scope has gotten more use up to now, but we have plans.  It's a bit of a work in progress and as our year in science progresses I'm sure we'll do some rearranging.

Organizing everything also helped us spot some shortfalls. We added a compass, a flexible measuring tape, a set of dual metric and imperial measuring cups, a bug box, and a bug field guide. We got the bug field guide from the Xerces Society.  They have some good fact sheets on their website about bees if anyone's working on a project on that.


Our favorites from the resources basket:


The boys love the guides that fold since they're light and they can carry them in their backpacks.

If you've got a favorite science tool that you use all the time and it looks like we're missing it, please add it to the comments box since I'm looking for suggestions.

Gyotaku

Gyotaku is the Japanese art of fish printing.  Older toad's actual birthday was on a weekday this week and daddy took some time off work to do this project with him.  My husband lives to fish so of course fish art is a perfect fit.  These fish were in the freezer left over from fish printing I taught at an art camp earlier this summer so there was some variety - Lookdown (above), a Glassnosed Skate and a Lane Snapper is what they chose.

Here are the steps:

First make sure your fish is very dry.  Once you've decided which side to print, remember prints are always reverse, paint it on top of a scrap paper.  This initial painting is messy so scrap paper keeps things cleaner.  It's traditional to use only black.  We like to use colors.  This day involved printing on shirts and rice paper so we used fabric paints and regular acrylics.

Next do a scrap print.  It helps to warm up, figure out the tricky parts on the fish you're printing, and gauge the right amount of paint to apply.

Sometimes it takes a couple scrap prints.

When you're ready for ones you might keep, paint your fish again.  It can be neat to do the fins in a different color.  The eye is always done last with a brush.

Now carefully move your painted fish to your clean printing space.  Spread out it's fins so they will print distinctly.  We like to use old baby diapers or other rags for a printing space because you can gently push the spines on the fins into the fabric to hold them in place. 

Now put your paper or shirt on top of your fish gently.  Rub gently over the entire area to be printed.  Like putting on stickers, start in one spot and gently move across.  Pay special attention to the fins and the edges of its body.

Now gently peel up your paper or shirt from one corner.  Hopefully you're thrilled with your results.  If not, that's ok, just try another one. 

If you don't have access to live fish several companies sell rubber replicas for prints.  I like Acorn Naturalists in CA.

Their work for the day.

Here are some resources if you want more information.

Allen Memorial Art Museum
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
Kennedy Center

US Cultural Exchange Package

We're participating in a US cultural package swap.  We just got our parcels out.  This is what was in them.

Older toad wrote a note with some things he wanted to say about our family and where we live.
We made soap (I forgot to put that in the picture) and 3 part montessori cards of all the tropical edibles in our yard.
Some squished pennies from those machines in our area that the toads love doing.
Postcards
Seashells
A placemat from the Columbia Restaurant that has some Cuban recipes on it.
Linger Lodge Road Kill Menu.
Temporary tattoos and a rack card from the Pier Aquarium.
A map from Lowry Park Zoo.
A Visitor's Guide to the Tampa Bay History Center.
A Visitor's Guide to The Museum of Science and Industry.
A Family Activity and Map from the Dali Museum.
An exhibition card for the St. Petersburg Crochet Coral Reef.
Booklet for the Chihuly Collection.
Discover Bays and Estuaries from Project Wet.
Boating and Angling Guide to Tampa Bay from the Florida Marine Research Institute.
Fishing Lines a beautifully illustrated fishing guide.  If you'd like to download your own copy go here.
An info sheet for Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE).

We're looking forward to seeing what we get.

Thanks to Melissa at Chasing Cheerios for setting this up!

Tampa Bay Staycation Tour

Slideshows of other people's vacations can be really boring...

So I thought I'd stick to the highlights of our recent staycation with links for those people planning on coming here or for those of you who like links to the education programming.  We get lots of tourists because it really is nice here.  I once posted on a large mommy listserve about vacation options for places to go for a mom and her toddler together as a vacation (back when I only had one tadpole).  My husband travels regularly and I thought it'd give the toad and I a change of scenery to go away while he was gone.  I didn't mention where we lived just asked for opinions on great places for a mom and kid to vacation.  There were 5 responses and every single person said the beach.  I sighed and we walked to the beach.

Here's our latest adventures.

Lowry Park Zoo - The animal above is an African okapi.  It's always one of my favorites to visit because they're so beautiful.  My husband hadn't been in three years so he had an especially good time.  Here's a link to the education page with PDF's for educational activities (look for self guided curriculum in the center of the page).  I took the opportunity of the vacation this week to start Zoo Story by Thomas French.  It's a book he wrote all about Lowry Park Zoo.  He used to be a reporter for the local newspaper and our recently reinvigorated Friends of the Library had him for a guest speaker at their one year anniversary which is where I picked up the book.  My grandmother used to take me to the zoo and I had not been to one in over 20 years until I had kids.  The author does a good job of talking about the specifics of this zoo and the philosophical implications of zoos in general.  There's a good bit of gender observations too which make for a good laugh.

Selby Gardens - This is only the second time we've been and we have had a lovely time both times. Here they have two PDF's for different ages to do a plant hunt.  I printed them out and attached them to handled paper bags for the kids to collect treasures (with strict instructions that treasure only comes off the ground and absolutely no picking).  I don't think they finished either one but they loved having an official place for all the seeds they found.  The PDF's were generic enough you could use them at a garden near you probably.  Also, they are known as a research institution so the website has lots of articles and resources available.

We went to the Dali for the first time since they relocated and expanded.  They did a wonderful job and the new museum was a great way to spend a morning.  My husband and I went with younger toad while the older was at preschool.  I hadn't taken him to a museum in years since they last time I did we both left in tears.  He was much better this time and enjoyed the scavenger hunt they provide the kids.

Museum of Science and Industry - Always lots to do there.  They have some online activities about water here.  They were having a kid's health fair on the day we went.  I picked up some great paper plates with the suggested portions illustrated and labeled.  The food pyramid never made a ton of sense but having portions divided into pie wedge fractions on a plate is easy to understand.  It looked like all the resources they had available at the fair were at the USDA's website here.

...and of course we went to the beach several times.  Grab your sunscreen and come some time!

Beach Safety

The Natural Resources Defense Council issued a report on beach water quality in 2009 called Testing the Waters.  They just released their 2012 update on their webpage here.  We're frequent beach goers and our beach has occasionally had problems.  It's worth a check if you're planning a trip to your favorite local sandy spot.

Also, if you've never researched sunscreens, head over to Environmental Working Groups 2012 Skin Deep 2012 sunscreen report here to research the best sunscreen for your family.

A Day in the Salt Marsh

My husband recently came home from a work trip with this book for the toads.


The book's publisher, Sylvan Dell, has a whole section on their website devoted to parents and homeschoolers here. The website has linked teaching guides as free PDF's to many of their publications.  The one for A Day in the Salt Marsh is here.  It's comprehensive, with enough fun stuff to serve for a whole unit study.  Many of their other titles have equally helpful resources.  I was thrilled to find a new resource for such quality free curriculum.

I also instantly had a soft spot for the book because it's illustrator, Consie Powell, also wrote and illustrated Old Dog Cora and the Christmas Tree.  Old Dog Cora is my favorite Newfoundland book because it reminds me of my beloved Newfie who passed away several years ago and I miss dearly.

Vie de Mer

This is the French component of our activity at the Florida Aquarium.

You can read the main post for the description of how we used this here.  Below are the cards for basic marine life in English with the corresponding French words.

vie de mer

Gulf Coast Marine Life Activity

When we did our unit on submersibles and submarines, I made up this workbook for a field trip to the Florida Aquarium.

The premise is you're Jacques Cousteau and you're surveying Gulf coast marine life by zone.   I've embedded the intro and name cards into this post.  The activity involved matching the names of the marine life to the images and arrange them in the correct biome.  I got the images from a variety of sources.  Google what you need for this or take this idea and adapt it to your local aquarium.  You will need plastic business card sleeves and jump rings to make a booklet like I did or you could always just pair them up as a matching game after your visit.

If you're not planning a visit to our local aquarium you could still use it after watching a nature show about the Gulf Coast or Jacques Cousteau. 

You can find a good visual explanation of marine biomes here if you need it.

A second element of the project included learning the French names for basic marine life.  That is in a separate post which you can read here.


Fl Aquarium Sub Projet Intro Name Cards