Whales, Whales

June 2018

It all started with a fantastic true story about the rescue of a humpback whale and then Sir David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II. Then D wanted to delve deeper into whales, different types of whales, dolphins and porpoises, and why we need to save them. That took a whole month. Sadly, we are nowhere close to a beach, and the last time we went to spot dolphins in the Indian Ocean, the boat encountered a glitch. Nevertheless, we got a fantastic speedboat ride back to shore!

Here are the pictures from our “whaling days”.

At the movies:

A play dough model of a humpback:

An experiment to show how fish swim in salty seawater: Mix concentrated salt water with food dyed water with a potato slice and plastic cut out for fins to demonstrate how fish neither sink nor float.

We also included the Giant Squid which led to explore the ocean zones.

Scratch art of deep sea animals (imaginary). We filled a thick sheet with crayon drawings, painted blue acrylics and scratched with an old pen.

Putting it all together:

Our display in the end.. we even explored deep sea divers Jean Cousteau and Sylvia Earle and marine geography heroine Marie Tharpe.

Giant Squid in oil and chalk pastels

Humpback: flipping on the back got it it’s name. In pastels

Dhruva’s all-on-his-own chalk pastel drawing of a whale

Clay painted model

Some origami – whale and krill

Paper Action Craft:

How whales feed:

Bubbling technique and attacking from below

Gulp on whole

Video below.

Pages from the journal

A friend’s Birthday party came up and we made a pull up whale card

Michael Morpurgo’s book “This morning I met a whale” (image later below)was very intense and poignant that we finished (read aloud) in one rainy afternoon. We cried through it. This bottle-nose whale below is from the book reproduced by me in chalk pastels.

Our whale study does not cease here. As we find more books we will keep adding them here. The journal is useful to go through what we have learnt. D tells me what he wants to put in there. This was a month long, and we read most of the whale books a number of times and enjoyed every bit, every time!