Titanic at Night

I thought it would be fun to do some art activities that took place at night.  Working on black paper gives different effects but we don't do it very often.

I took this coloring page at Kids-n-fun and redrew a simplified version on to black paper.

Titanic at Night

I cut a sponge into a star shape and glued it on to a cork.  Keeping my Toddler entertained did a blog post about her button stamps that gave me the idea for this.

Then I gave younger Toad his paint which included iridescent medium.  It's the best thing ever because it makes all your paint shimmery.  The boys went through a phase where they refused to paint without it.  The picture above is his interpretation of the project.  He had colored pencils and a paint brush too.

For older Toad, I took one of his premade books and glued black paper to the front.  On the back I glued his ticket from the exhibition.  I talked about the exhibition in my first Titanic activities post here.  I gave him our box of Prismacolors and asked him to do a drawing of the Titanic hitting the iceberg.  I said the project as a whole was to describe his experiences the night the Titanic sank from the perspective of Nils  Odahl.  Mr. Odahl is the passenger that he was assigned for the exhibition.  Then he chose to fill one whole side of the book with a drawing of the Titanic with its lifeboats being lowered.

On the other side he wrote his story.  It said:
The night was quiet.  Suddenly the Titanic crashed into an iceberg.  Just before the Titanic sank it split in two.  The bow sank right away.  The stern bobbed for a few seconds then sank.  The Titanic was gone.  Survivors huddled in lifeboats.  Around 3:30 AM a signal rocket streaked the sky.  Mr. Nils sank in the disaster.

  
To focus on the good things about this story - Older Toad's handwriting is soooo much better.  It's great that it's legible.  His spelling is awesome.  Now I have to interject as the nitpicky teacher and detective of all things curriculum.  We've been using All About Spelling as our spelling curriculum.  I've been really pleased with it and have continued to use the lessons in order thinking learning each spelling rule would give him a good foundation.  Which after doing this story I think I need to reevaluate.  Toad's become a cautious speller.  He wants to confirm every letter before he commits it to paper.  If you press him he will spell every word orally fine.  I think I'm stifling his writing by focusing on the handwriting and spelling.  

During this story I told him he spells great and needs to be more confident and just write it down.  I told him I'd help him with his spelling after he was done but I'm sure he'd spell everything right.  Starting with ...Survivors and ending with..sky, rather than try and spell he got out one of the Titanic books we've been reading to confirm the spelling of the words since I said I wasn't helping him until the end.  Coincidentally, those two sentences in his story sure sounded exactly like the ones in the book.  When we read his story together at the end, we had a talk about what plagiarism is and why it's bad.

Moving forward on our creative writing journey I think I need to jump ahead in the All About Spelling curriculum so he's being pushed more.  If he's being pushed he'll make some mistakes and correct them, and see it's all okay and part of learning. I'm also going to get the Grammar Island curriculum from Royal Fireworks Press.  I've heard good things about it and I think focusing on aspects of writing more than mechanics at this time would give him more opportunities for creativity.  I'm hoping it'll help him see his story as a large work of art rather than focusing on the minutia of each letter.



 
 
 

Iridescent Medium 2.5 oz. When mixed with watercolor, this medium gives an iridescent, glittery effect.

Premier Colored Pencil Sets set of 36 These soft, thick lead pencils have been enhanced with a better bonding process, providing professional, artist quality color while resisting breakage. They provide high blendability, excellent lightfastness, and a smooth laydown that will not scratch.Unmatched in brilliance, Prismacolor Premier Colored Pencils are perfect for illustration, renderings, landscape, and portraiture. The pencils are non-toxic, AP certified, and do not contain rainforest wood.

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Titanic activity for preschoolers

The Titanic exhibit is currently in town.  I thought it would be something fun for older Toad and I to do together.  I got What Sank the World's Biggest Ship as an introduction to the subject so we could learn a bit together before we went.





Younger Toad enjoyed it a lot too, and learned enough that walking through the library he found this DK book in the aisle, recognized it was the Titanic, and insisted we check it out.




Once we got home, even before we read the book, we had a long talk about the boilers on the ship and how they ran the motors and propellers and steam came out the smokestacks.  By now I was feeling guilty that I hadn't planned on taking him, so we went as a family on the day after Thanksgiving.  He did not behave all that great but it did seem to make an impression on him.  He's still talking about the iceberg in the exhibit.  I was glad for all the reading we did beforehand because there was not a lot of interpretation of the objects.  The kids were able to insert the objects into their memories of what we'd read and I think it would have been rooms of meaningless stuff if we hadn't done our homework.

There was a large picture of the boiler room in the exhibit. After our previous conversation about the boilers and pipes I thought younger Toad might enjoy a project designed around them.

I drew an extremely simplified version of the center of the ship on 12" X 24" paper.  I provided glue, aluminum foil 'boilers', pipe cleaner 'pipes" and cotton ball 'exhaust' to get glued down.

He enjoyed the project and we had to reread all our Titanic books several times after finishing.  He had a hard time with getting the pipe cleaners flat but enjoyed connecting the boilers to the smokestacks.

 

It would have been downright mean of me to break out the pipe cleaners and not let the older Toad play too so this is his interpretation of the project.

Below are some resources for elementary students that older Toad also did a few selected things from.

Here is the website for RMS Titanic who has salvaged the wreck and organizes the current Titanic exhibits.  If you click through to the learning center you can download a free educators guide (for K-12 students).

Older Toad also put together the Rick Geary postcard of the Titanic for a small paper model.

Magic Treehouse activities has a companion to Tonight on the Titanic.





We're finishing up our Titanic readings with T is for Titanic.  Teacher's guide to T is for Titanic.




They give each exhibit attendee a ticket with a brief biography of a real Titanic passenger.  At the end of the exhibit are the names of all the passengers organized by class and crew divided up into who survived and who died.  As a family (Grandma and Grandpa went too) three of us survived the tragedy and three of us did not.  Even though three of us "died" on our journey we all learned a lot and enjoyed the exhibit.


If you want to do this too here's the blank.  It's more fun enlarged if you want to redraw it.  This activity would also be fun for preparing for a cruise or a unit study about ships.

Blank Titanic

The companion post to this one, Titanic at Night, published later is here.

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Last Week of September

We had some fun adventures this week.

1.  Making butter in the cracker house at the Tampa Bay History Center.

2.  Homeschool History Day was the reason for going and here's their mystery object activity.

3.  Sensory bins for the little ones.

4. Floor sized compass rose to label with the cardinal directions.

5.  Our first family triathlon.  It was a mini triathlon with a 1 mile run, 3 mile bike, and 1/4 mile swim.  We completed it as a family with a new family best as it was the first one we've done.

6.  We finished our volcano lap book.  This was a great freebie from homeschool share available here.
 
And of course we did the regular stuff like the 3'rs too.