Deep Down

Friday was a great day for my class! We got all of our work done early so recess was extra-long and we had a really fun workshop that afternoon!

I know you’re supposed to have a routine for your kids but that routine isn’t always going to be followed. My students actually do well when our routine gets thrown off and thank goodness because it gets thrown off quite often!

Our workshop Friday afternoon was from 12:30-2 so we didn’t get to go to chapel or lunch. Instead, we ate lunch early in our classroom and I gave the kids an extra credit coloring sheet for history. They loved getting to eat in the room! I have two tables at the back of my room and everyone pulled chairs up to them so they could eat together. That left me with the whole front of the room to myself and a few minutes of peace and quiet.

After lunch, we headed to the gym for our “Deep Down” workshop. It was an in-school field trip so instead of going through the hassle of getting 12 kids to another location, the field trip came to us! We had a great leader who knew a lot of information on our topic.

The kids got to do interactive experiments to discover how sound waves work, the wonders of echo-location, how fish can live in the Arctic Ocean, and the relationship between clown fish and jellyfish.

To a have a visual picture of sound waves, my students played with a slinky. They didn’t make it move down steps like I did as a kid. They made it go up and down at the same time! Our leader showed the kids how to shake the slinky so that it would bounce waves back and forth between each pair of students. This is how sound waves travel!

Next, the students were divided into groups of three. There was a "dolphin", a "coral", and a "fish." Dolphins use echo-location to find food. To demonstrate this, the "dolphin" had a flashlight, the "coral" had a mirror, and the "fish" was the prey! The "dolphin" aimed the light from the flashlight at the mirror and it reflected from the mirror onto the "fish." Real dolphins use sound to find food by bouncing it off of things such as coral and shells so that it will hit the prey they are searching for. The fish enjoyed trying to get away from the reflected light!

Why is a walrus or fish much better equiped to live in the Arcitc than us? They have blubber! This blubber insulates their bodies so they don’t freeze to death in the cold ocean. We used blubber to keep our fingers from freezing in our mini “Arctic Ocean.”

Each child was given a glove to put on one hand but nothing for the other. One by one, they were called to a table so they could rub one of their covered fingers in Crisco. This served as blubber for our experiment. They then placed their “blubber” finger and a finger with no covering in the mini “Arctic Ocean.” They soon realized that the “blubber” finger stayed much warmer in the cold water than the finger that had no covering on it.

The same principle holds true for animals with and without blubber! If we were thrown into the freezing ocean, we would be very cold because we do not have large amounts of blubber on our bodies. However, animals made for cold water have blubber!

Lastly, the kids learned that clown fish are the only fish that live in harmony with jellyfish. To help them remember this, they created their own jellyfish with clown fish mingling between the tentacles. This was a fantastic workshop that reinforced what my students have been learning in their fish unit!