Shark Week… and a day or two more…

So Discovery’s Shark Week has come and we got all caught up in the madness. I was liberal with my choices in taping for the kids and prewatched a few first (Submarine the massively huge shark special was deleted quickly) but we certainly got our fill on some excellent and not so excellent shows. I will include our watched list including one lucky Dirty Jobs find on Animal Planet that week. Just remember, some are more… ratings grabbers than truly educational pieces… though we found ANYTHING narrated by Mike Rowe was a goldmine for the kids. Of course, we fell in love with him on Dirty Jobs and the kids want to watch anything with him or his voice on it!

We watched quite a few shows

  • Bull Shark: World’s Deadliest Shark
  • Shark City
  • Monster Hammerhead
  • Shark Feeding Frenzy
  • Great White Highway
  • Lair of the Mega Shark
  • Great White Invasion
  • Return of Jaws
  • Dirty Jobs, Season 4 Episode 18: Greenland Shark Quest
  • Zombie Sharks
  • Deadly Stripes: Tiger Sharks
  • Sharkzilla (with people off Mythbusters)
  • Jaws Strikes Back
  • Alien Sharks
  • Alien Sharks: Return of the Abyss
  • Deadly Waters

We also branched out with some very brief reading on some lesser known sharks to write on the back of some shark images we printed from one of our saved files. I am including these sharks here:

  • The Thresher Shark thanks to Shark Sider HERE. Gavin was especially interested in this shark due to its unusual tail that we later found out it uses to hunt! 
  • The Whale Shark is one of Zander’s favourites. We found facts thanks to Animals Time HERE.
  • The Nurse Shark thanks to National Geographic HERE. A rather interesting LARGE shark who really only eats microscopic items!
  • The White Tip Shark thanks to The Telegraph HERE.
  • The Lemon Shark thanks to Sharks-World HERE.
  • There was a print out error in the square pictures and we did not have one for the Mako shark even though it was featured in other lists in the same print out. So we made our own slightly larger paper with a hand drawing and information we found at the EnchantedLearning site HERE.

Of course we went to our usual sources for Shark print outs etc and while we did not DO  a lot of crafts and settled instead for drawing our own pictures and having fun “what if” discussions we do have some links to help you out on your shark themed learning!

  • Activity Village has a little bit of everything. Though we did not use their how to draw a shark instructions. You can find their general list of resources HERE.
  • We used Art for Kids’ shark how to draw instructions for sharks  HERE. The kids loved the expression on this shark’s face! They also have Hammerhead instructions HERE. I do wish there was a print out page for this one as we love including the instructions in our finished folders and adding them to our overflowing binder of Art for Kids print outs.

For spelling words we started out the week with 10 general shark words:

  1. shark 
  2. swim
  3. carnivore
  4. eggs
  5. fish
  6. ocean
  7. fin
  8. gill
  9. pup
  10. teeth

For the second week I took the list of 10 most dangerous sharks from Angel Fire site HERE. For Trinity and Emanuel I just did two random shark related words a day. Emanuel’s favourite was hammer and head… the moment he said the two together he just lit up!

With some of the worksheets there were questions about shark anatomy. I found a decent list of fin information on the site KidCyber.com HERE.

We looked up two different terms for our studies… breaching where we  took the definition off the top of our good search HERE. Out second term was opportunistic feeders. We found our definition on the Merriam Webster site HERE.

We also did a quick animal report on the Remora. We figured we wanted to know more about this fish we continually saw in almost all of our Discovery channel shows. Sadly not much is known about certain aspects of the fish, BUT the site Animal Diversity Web had some interesting (if not complicated) information for us to use on our report HERE.

Emanuel has had an interest in the Cookiecutter Sharks since he saw them on Octonauts (HERE). So we did up a colouring page thanks to KidsPlayColor.com HERE. We used the information on EnchantedLearning HERE to do a quick write up on the back of our colouring page to include in our shark book. With over 200 species I am figure we will continue finding sharks of interest over the years!

We didn’t do much in the way of books as there was SO MUCH Discovery Channel content, but I did pull what we had on sharks out of our personal collection:

  • Incredible Sea Creatures by Reading Discovery (a level 2 reader)
  • Amazing Sharks by Melvin Berger
  • Life in the Water – A Child’s First Library of Learning

I certainly hope all of this information can be of some help! Good luck! 101_9641 101_9642

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