a is for aquarium

To kick off our focus on the lowercase letter a, we talked about aquariums.

Field Trip: Shedd Aquarium

We were blessed with the opportunity to have free all access admission to Chicago's Shedd aquarium this month courtesy of my husband's workplace and we took full advantage of this deal! A couple Saturdays ago we met some friends at the aquarium and spent the day looking at the fish. We attended the dolphin show, looked at sharks and the kids had fun dressing up and pretending to be penguins.

Jonathan & Mommy at the Aquarium

Pretending to be a penguin

Playing on a sea turtle

Jonathan sat through the dolphin show pretty well and giggled at the dolphins, whales, and sea lions. But his favorite thing was to see the turtles swimming- "silly turtles!". We found a little plastic turtle toy to take home with us.

Sign Language 


We learned the sign for aquarium.

Books

When we got home, we read Curious George Goes to the Aquarium. There are actually  two different stories about George going to the aquarium. The first, Curious George Goes to the Aquarium, published in the '80s, is about George accidentally becoming part of the seal show. The second, Curious George at the Aquarium, was published more recently, has George making a lot of penguin friends. This story also includes some educational facts about aquariums. Of course, in each story George gets in a lot of trouble!

Find Curious George at the Aquarium in your local library
Find Curious George Goes to the Aquarium in your local library

Movies

We watched one of our favorite Signing Time DVDs, The Zoo Train, which has a section devoted to aquarium animals. We then reviewed the signs for the different sea animals we saw.

Find Signing Time: The Zoo Train in your local library









Art


I found some sea animal stickers at Target over by the birthday cards/invitations area. We put the stickers onto blue construction paper and talked about the different animals.

You could also do a similar craft by printing out and coloring some pictures of marine animals here. Then simply cut out and glue the animals on construction paper. We're currently working on placing stickers (using Kumon's Let's Sticker and Paste!) and this was a great supplementary activity. I have to help him get the sticker off of the paper, but then he puts it on himself and pats it into place. I think I may give him a sheet of dot stickers to help him practice peeling stickers from the paper. Maybe we'll try that next week...





Other Web Resources


Cup O Fish- a great aquarium related snack (found this a little to late to use it this time!) We just ate goldfish crackers. :)

Aquarium Lesson Plan @ First School