Shark Exploration of Underwater Creatures

Today we continue our underwater creature explorations with sharks. Now we are giving you some of our activities and books that we use in preparation of our reviews of a book and DVD on The Octonauts. The review of the DVD including a giveaway will be on Tuesday!! If you missed our first underwater creature exploration, you can check it out on jellyfish.

Great White Shark Source: By Sharkdiver.com (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Now truth be told, Hazel is a bit afraid of sharks. I figured learning more about them would help with this fear. When we went to Sea World, she didn't want to check out the sharks at all. Perhaps it is from hearing us discuss checking to see if the beach at Cape Cod is closed due to shark sightings--though we often go to the bay side to swim where there is no need to check. Since the DVD has a couple of shark episodes on it, I thought getting her more comfortable with them would be helpful.

We started our exploration the same as our jellyfish exploration with books from the library. After reading a few we discovered two things--sharks have many rows of teeth (at least four) and their teeth grow back when lost and their scales are called denticles because they are like small teeth and are very sharp. One book described it like sandpaper. This gave us an idea for our first craft. 

For our first craft we used the printable over at Learn Create Love: Printable Shark Craft. I cut out the paper patterns and instead of having Hazel add color, I had her trace them onto the back of sandpaper.

Then I cut them out and we glued them together with a glue stick. Hazel added an eye with a black pen and I cut the mouth from the printable. Hazel also added some grey color to the side fin just to make it more visible.

For our second shark craft we got inspiration from Almost Unschoolers: Paper Plate Shark Craft and Brie Brie Blooms: Kids Shark Craft Puppet. Instead of using a paper plate for the teeth, we decided to use cupcake liners and we used four for the minimum number of rows of teeth. I thought cupcake liners would be easier for Hazel to cut though she still did not like cutting the zig zag of the mouth. To make this one, I folded a piece of construction paper in half and cut out the shape of the shark and then we folded each cupcake liner (we used two different sizes) and cut random zig zags for the teeth. We glued them to the shark body and Hazel added two eyes. 

We felt our two crafts illustrated two of the characteristics we learned about sharks. We also learned that there are very few human deaths by sharks. They do not usually attack people and if they do they often do not continue to eat one.

Another book these crafts go with is a folktale from Hawaii, Punia and the King of Sharks adapted by Lee Wardlaw. In this wonderful story, Punia and his mother are basically starving and Punia finds a way to trick the Shark King and his followers into letting him take a lobster from their special lobster spot. Punia continues to trick the Shark King until all the sharks are gone. Punia becomes a hero to all the village.

For more oceanlife crafts and posts check out:

• Cinderella Penguin
• Wild and Free: Dolphins, Whales and Manatees
• Jellyfish Exploration
• Trip to Boston
• Pinterest Board

I hope you will join us tomorrow for Virtual Book Club for Kids and Tuesday for our review and giveaway!!