# 9 - Octopus

[Marie]

Lesson # 9 Octopus


Additional ideas might be located on other boards:
ECC / Australia: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=151
ECC / Japan: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=153
First Grade / Under the Sea: viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3550

[Karen]

We are caught up in the hustle and bustle of the season, but took some time to enjoy Book Day for O-o-Octopus. We followed suggestions given for A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle. We read the book then drew Hermit Crab. We put our crabs on craft sticks and then drew several of each of the animals/objects that Hermit Crab found. These we stuck on craft sticks with Tack-n-Stick. As Hermit Crab invites each animal to decorate his home we took it off the stick and stuck it on the Hermit Crab. The kids loved putting on a puppet show and sticking all the objects on the crab. We don't have a puppet show theater, so we just stood behind our easel and set the book on the little desk portion and they flipped through the pages to help remember each part of the story. We had so much fun!

Enjoy the holidays!
Karen, Abbey, and Ernie

[Kim]

Author: Kim
Date: 11/25/2002

This past weekend we were at University of Michigan's Natural History Museum (to see dinosaurs) and the gift shop had tubes of coral reef animals. I bought them for water play (my girls are playing with them right now and loving it). It contains two dolphins, two sharks, several types of fish (trigger, damsel, angel, parrot, grouper), a starfish and crab, stingray, and even an octopus! I've seen (I think) little packets of fish at the dollar store. Give the kids that and a container of water and they'll take off.

I also am thinking of having a seafood night this week. I have some shrimp in the freezer that I bought on sale a while back and imitation crab isn't too expensive. As these are things an octopus would eat, I thought it might be fun to give them a try.

A great book we found at the library is called "An Octopus is Amazing" by Patricia Lauber. It's in the Let's Read and Find Out Science series

[Archiver2]

Octopus Snack
Posted by Nancy » 11/1/2002
A fun idea I found on the internet: Make hot dogs into octopi (octopus). Use a whole hot dog for each child. Before cooking slice one end of the hotdog parallel about 1/2 way up. Do this again-so that you have 4 legs. Then cut those each in 1/2 and you end up with 8 legs! Boil hotdogs and the arms curl up looking like an octopus!

Seaweed for the octopus snack above
Posted by Maria » 11/1/2002
You can also serve some green ramen noodles to be the seaweed by just adding a little green food coloring to them while they cook. It makes a nice bed of seaweed the octopus can lay on. I also cut X slits for eyes and nose before cooking. Neat idea!!
Maria

octopus lunch
Posted by Winkie » Fri Oct 14, 2005 7:48 pm
we had hot dog octopuses for lunch one day (as described above) served on spinach fettuccine "seaweed". i used 2 dots of mustard for eyes and 1 dot of ketchup for a mouth. my kindergartner looked at it & said, "But mommy, the mouth is supposed to be on the bottom. Can you do it that way the next time you make these?" lol! i'm glad he's learning. :-)
~Wendy

[Janie]

Author: Janie
Date: 11/12/2001 9:10 am PDT

Hi Ladies,
I found this web site. It offers "virtual feild trips" of different areas such as the oceans and rain forrests. I am going to use this site for W-w water and O-o Octopus.
The address is:
http://www.field-trips.org/index.htm
Hope you enjoy it!
Janie

[Janie]

Author: Janie
Date: 11/11/2001

I found a web site that has printable ocean life caledar pages for children to color. The address is:
http://www.zoomwhales.com/coloring/oceanlife.shtml
Enjoy!
Janie <><

[ls22221]

My son and I just finished the Octopus unit before Christmas Break. He loves to be read to, so during times he is meticulously coloring his school papers I read to him, usually something related to our unit. I found a really neat non-fiction, but fiction-type, book called "Pagoo" by Holling Clancey Holling in our public library. It has a copyright in the 1940's, if I remember correctly. It tells the story of a hermit crab from tiny to full grown. It is suspense-full, accurate, with nice color and line drawings of the animals discussed on the pages. It's lengthy (about 16 chapters) and so not a good choice for a child not ready for chapter books. We will never forget that a hermit crab is more accurately called pagurus! And, yes, there is an octopus in the story!

[Winkie]

These are books we really enjoyed for this unit:
Herman the Helper - Robert Kraus (really sweet story!)
My Very Own Octopus - Bernard Most (has a brief Halloween mention)

Info books:
How to Hide an Octopus - Ruth Heller (about animal camoflauge)
Octopuses - Lola Schaefer
Octopus Under the Sea - Connie & Peter Roop

[ShariD]

We just read a wonderful fiction book about octopi. It is called "Nico's Octopus" by Caroline Pitcher. The story is about a boy who rescues a small octopus from a fisherman's net and takes it home. The book has beautiful watercolor pictures and includes a tremendous number of facts for a fiction book, all woven into the story. I found it at our public library, so I hope others can find it at theirs. It was so good that both of my children reached for it to take away and read again as soon as I closed it!

[Bevin]

We were inthralled with ocean life last week as we studied the octopus and the amazing creativity of God!

One resource that we especially enjoyed was National Geographic's "Deep Sea Dive" video in their Really Wild Animals series.

Beautiful footage, very age appropriate, and fun to watch. We "re-checked" it from the library twice before finally relinquishing it.

[JoyfulDancer~]

From Laurie:
We just started O-o-Octopus today, with great enjoyment, but hit upon a question. On the Lesson 9 Day 1 Picture Cards Page there are 5 pictures that start with o sound. 4 we figured out, but there is one that looks like a Yak or a Buffalo. Does anyone know what that is? We have named it "The unknown animal that starts with the o sound."


From Amy:
I think you are not alone. Seems that a while back someone else asked the same question. I believe what you are refering to is an O-o-Ox.
HTH.


From Jodi:
We're on that same lesson and while we figured out ox we couldn't figure out one of the other pictures!! Turned out to be otter!! (I think)

[RachelT]

Hi! Here are some more books that we enjoyed reading during this unit.

Good Thing You're Not an Octopus! by Julie Markes (fiction)
An Octopus Followed Me Home by Dan Yaccarino (fiction)
Hide and Seek Underwater Life by Valerie Davies (nonfiction)
My World Sea Animals by Tammy J. Schlepp (nonfiction)

We also found "Arty Facts Oceans and Art Activities" by Janet Sacks, which gave us inspiration for our ocean mural. There are way too many cool projects in this book for us to do them all this week, but there are some variations on the mural using strips of tissue paper, aluminum foil, and plastic wrap to create the water and it really made our mural poster come to life!

Editing: During our 2nd year of MFWK O-o-octopus, we also found a simple craft project using a paper lunch bag. We stuffed a wad of newspaper in the bottom, tied a rubber band around the bag above that (the head) then cut the bottom of the bag into strips or tentacles and decorated the head with a face. Voila - a toy octopus!

[Mom2MnS]

Hi :) Here are some fun things we did during our Oo octopus study...

Arm Art

Place white paper, eyedroppers, black tempera paint, and suction cups on the table. Discuss what body parts an octopus might use to paint a picture… then try out the suction cups and eye droppers!

Tasty Octopus Arms

Refrigerated breadstick dough
Cheerios
Grape or Blackberry jam

Unroll and line breadsticks on a cookie sheet. Count out ten Cheerios for each breadstick, and place them on the “arms” to look like suckers. Bake at 325 for 8-10 minutes. When cool serve with the jam (ink dip).

Sea Globe

small baby food jar
water
blue food coloring
sequins, silver glitter, small clear beads (purple, green, blue)
tiny seashells, rocks

Fill baby food jar with water – add 1 drop blue food coloring.
Add doo dads of your choice from the list. Shake and enjoy!

WLIC, Quinne

[nhneubauer]

www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/inve ... ring.shtml

www.first-school.ws/t/fsoctopus.html

Nicole

[Kirsty]

We just read

World Book Encyclopedia: Under the sea, by Angela Wilkes
It has great fact pages on lots of sea creatures (including turtle which was great to revisit). Then it has a story about an octopus at the end!

[serinat]

I really liked this book:

Octopus by Rebecca Stefoff

Our library had this one. Good information, and neither too simple/short nor too complex/long.

[Mom2MnS]

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 9:18 pm

Field trip idea: The beach!

[fruitbake]

http://edweb.sdsu.edu/people/bdodge/sca ... p180wl.gif

A blank, black-and-white world map to color on day 3

[cbollin]

MFW K with autism

My daughter loved Is This a House for Hermit Crab?

we enjoyed the Reading Rainbow version first. Then enjoyed the book. Try to play with your child on this one. I was the pricklepine fish chasing her all over the room. So that book was a fun one for us to act the story and to really enjoy the repeating lines together.

We had a blast with this book.

We did get some picture books at the library, but she wasn't all that interested in the information about sea creatures. That's alright. We did a lots of singing and dancing together in this unit to go with the theme. And she kept running over to put in our DVD of Praise Moves (an exercise dvd). So, the big stuff was connecting.

She enjoyed counting backwards and forward on the octopus arms.

We did a make shift field trip to the pet store to look at fish.

-crystal

[Mom2M&M]

PBS.org has a FABULOUS series called "Nature". You can watch some on-line. They are longer shows but great if you have children interested in raw nature stuff. Again, watch the episodes first because they might not be suitable for all children.

[2mymasuly]

My daughter and I enjoyed the following books for this unit:

Tickly Octopus by Ruth Galloway (great fiction story about an octopus but filled with fun information about the octopus and it's many functions)

Down in the Sea: The Octopus by Patricia Kite (good illustrations and simply written for understanding on all learning levels)

God Bless!

Heather, wife to Aaron
Mother to three :)

[cbollin]

For a virtual tour of ocean animals, maybe some of this would help:

http://www.akidsphoto.com/critters/aqua.html
(I like this one... it's not afraid to have scripture that God created those animals. <grin>)

and related
http://www.akidsheart.com/animals/sea/seas.htm

having fun from a land locked state......

[Dorothysodeep]

For the ocean mural we did the best thing! My daughter decided that cheerios look like suction cups, so we made a big tentacle and glued a bunch of cheerios to it!

[ab.grace]

My daughter and I have been singing this song since day 1 of this unit. We tried the suggested song, but dd seemed disinterested, so I started singing, "If I were a Butterfly" If you are not familiar with the song, there is a verse that says, "if I were an octopus, I'd thank you Lord for my good looks!"

[cbollin]

If you are doing or have done ECC, grab Living World Encyclopedia and turn to pages 26-27 for some ocean and octopus information.

-crystal