Fish and Grunion Run

Brielle requested a week to learn more about Fish.  I've had a Grunion Run on my list of things I want to do, so I planned the Fish week to correspond with the Grunion Run for our field trip.

Grunion are a type of fish that lay their eggs in the sand.  It happens at high tide during Full or New Moons between the months of March and July.  The problem is, that it takes place in the middle of the night, between 11pm and 1am.  

We had a picnic on the beach, and then did some geocaching while waiting for it to be time.

During the months of March, June and July you are allowed to catch the fish.  It is interesting to see the wave come up and the beach covered in little silver fish.  You can grab them off the sand, but you have to be quick before the next wave come and they go back in the water.

As for some of our learning time activities:

We've done graphing with goldfish before.  I added an extra challenge for Brielle to do more math by adding her rows together.

We worked more with patterns

and I had the kids work as a team to line up the fish in ordinal sequence

We got out the chopsticks (working on finger dexterity) to sort fish

learned how to draw fish (I forgot to take a picture of the books for the week.  But, I liked that this one had facts about the fish on one side, so I could teach the kids more about the fish as they were drawing. This was called How to Draw Fish, by Justin Lee.)

And we practiced number recognition by playing Go Fish

Food

I have a fish shaped cookie cutter, so we had a lot of fish shaped food for lunch

and even tried to make fish out of our snacks (idea from here...which is much, much cuter.)