Oceans

by susan
(scotland)

Hi Julie,

We have just started doing a topic on oceans. We couldn't believe our luck when we stumbled upon (or rather almost walked past) 2 basking sharks, a mum and baby, gorgeous. Can you beleive I didn't have my camera, I usually take it everywhere.

My son is 9.5yo and loves the animal side of the project but when I tried to read from horrible geography's Odious Oceans book, his eyes rolled heavenward.

Do you know of any geography sites, perhaps with on-line games. We did (grudgingly on his part) the ones on the BBC site and he actually quite enjoyed it.

Thank you for a great and timely newsletter. I love the smorgasbord homeschool curriculum idea. Will try it soon.

Kind regards

Susan

Hi Susan
Thanks for the message - I am delighted that you are enjoying the site.

I got the same reaction to the Horrible Geography books! But seeing basking sharks must have been fabulous.

The only game I could really come up with was the Jewel of Muscat game where you navigate a ship around the oceans. It is a pretty hard game, but quite realistic in terms of oceans and weather conditions.

I did find some other stuff though that I thought you might like to try:

Make a wave powered boat.

You could explain that the Earth is a biosphere - and make your own. (I have been meaning to write a page about this for ages - our biosphere lasted for months!).

Make your own water cycle. There is another example here and an easy version.

Take a look at extracting salt from the sea - just leave a bowl of sea water on a windowsill and let the water evaporate.

Experiment about water erosion. There are some great pictures showing examples of that here.

Experiment about tides.

We have had great success looking for fossils and mermaids purses on the beach.

I hope that gives you some ideas to get started with!. Best of luck with your project.