Animals! Animals! | Aquatic Life Diorama (1st Grade Science Project)

Crafts Day!

We have this recently imposed "Friday is crafting day" thing that goes on in our little homeschool. This is the idea of Little Miss and the Little Man. Anyway, I think this is just another way of saying, "We're tired of studying, can it be the weekend already?". I have nothing opposed to this. Hmmm, this could really be a good idea! Yay, early rest day for us.

Of course, as homeschoolers, this day should not go to waste and should still be geared towards the completion of our goals. So teacher-mommy took the chance to make them finish a Science project for Little Man.

We take out our arts materials -- paints and brushes, scissors, coloring pens, pencils, colored paper, and glue. We also have lots of boxes from our grocery shopping and it is time to recyle!

We're doing an aquatic life diorama!

Our lesson is all about animals - different kinds of animals and their habitat. Last year, the @divinekids created a forest animals puppet show. This time, they did one for aquatic animals.

The first task was to create the background. For this, Little Man and Little Miss just painted white paper blue to represent the sea water. There was no particular rule - they could use anything - their brushes or their fingers. It was totally up to them as long as they complete the task while having fun!

Teacher mommy helped them cut out some sea plants that Little Man carefully glued at the bottom of the sea.

We did small and big plants.

Cut! Cut!

Little Man still needs a lot of fine motor skills enhancement so I mostly ask him to do cutting and pasting exercises. This project was no exemption. We have some animal flash cards from a long time ago and he chose those that would fit our diorama.

Teacher Mommy contributed a blue whale, while Little Miss created an octopus and a starfish (which you will see at the bottom of this post).

More fine motor skills exercises.

These little fingers need to be put into more work. Once they finished the sea animals, the next thing to to was to hang them in our box.

Little Man gladly poked holes on the top of our box using the tip of the pencil, and then inserted the strings with our animals attached.

Presenting.... Our Aquatic Animals Diorama!

Here's a product of the kid's hard work. We jokingly said that the octopus looks like a blushing ghost. LOL. But hey, this thing has eight tentacles so this must really be an octopus. :D

We also discussed what other animals we could have put here, like crabs, shrimps, and clams! Wait, what about sharks?

Looking back, we could have made this diorama a bit more realistic by adding some sand and shells at the sea floor. Anyway, maybe next time.