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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Rosie's Walk Craft

Younger Toad loves Rosie's Walk.  He loves slapstick humor and giggles his little head off when you read it to him.  I thought he'd enjoy a project using Rosie's Walk and our chickens.

The booklet itself is construction paper cut to 9" X 11".  The square section not cut away is 2" X 2".  You leave the 2" X 2" tab at the top left and with each succeeding page, move the tab over 2".  I should have done 8.5" X 11" because 1" was too big for the margin.  You can see there's some blank bit at the top right corner instead of being smooth below the last tab.  Dinah Zike's books are great for learning how to make these interesting projects.

I found some leaf foam stickers and large fall foam decorations at the dollar store that we used to decorate our story.  I even had some small fox stickers that all got stuck to the same page.

Toad told the story:

Rusty walked into a wheeler [that's the name he gave our chicken palace.  I did a post about that here].  

Then she was trapped.

Mama ate Rusty.  

I don't eat chicken so I thought this was a pretty funny story.  Older Toad came home from Nature camp and liked his brother's work so much he got himself out some paper and decorated his own story with the materials.  He even called it 'Mama eats Rusty'.  I'm not sure what they're trying to tell me.

If you don't have your own chicken spokesmodels, I've attached the sheet of ours I worked up.  I printed them out on  full sheet sticker paper.  The down side of that is you'll have to help the kids peel the backing off, it's a bit tricky for anyone.  You could always print them on regular paper and use a glue stick after trimming.   Toad did not like that I stuck the chicken stickers to the top tabs  -  just passing on that feedback.Rosies Walk Sheet

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