Field Trip

One of the beautiful things about doing homeschool is that we have the flexibility to travel. I decided to take the kids to the beach for a week of oceanography and marine biology studies. The original idea was to meet my sister-in-law there with her kids so the cousins could all do school together, but unfortunately she had to cancel last minute. I kept with my original plans, and though it was sometimes challenging being a solo parent with four kids at the beach (without their fun friends to distract them), it was worth it.

We are fortunate to have the use of my Grandma's beach house on Fripp Island.  The views of the sunset over the marsh are always breathtaking.

To prepare for this trip, I reserved lots of books about the ocean from the library, found some fun ocean themed worksheets, and came up with a few activities (in addition to bringing our core math and English workbooks).  I knew our experiences would also be the springboard for learning and discussion.  On day one I started with an ocean animal art project.  I love giving the kids freedom to develop a project to fit their interests and abilities, and they sorta blew me out of the water with the simple start I gave them: "Lets make ocean animals with construction paper."

Vera (left) created a story with her sea animal pictures, Silas (middle) had me draw at least 10 species on his pages, which he embellished and developed into a long tale.  William (right) decided to show the different levels of the ocean and some of the species that live in each (sunlight down to the abyss...his idea).  We learned details about each animal we drew (Vera says, for example, "I learned that an octopus is an invertebrate.").

We did an experiment about why the ocean is salty (and getting saltier as rivers deposit more minerals daily).  4T of salt were dissolved into 1 cup of water and left on the porch during our stay.  Each day the kids made observations about how the clear liquid got more shallow while salt crystals formed.  The water evaporated but left the minerals behind.  They also kept a chart observing the tide.

It was interesting to observe the effects of Hurricane Matthew on the island.  Lots of trees were uprooted like the one by the playground above.  Piles of limbs lined the roads as residents cleared their lots of debris.

Though there was obvious damage, I'm thankful that most houses only experienced minor damage (lots of water damage throughout the island, but few total disasters).

One thing nearly every homeowner on the island lost was their electric golf carts.  With over a foot of flooding throughout the island, the electronics on all the golf carts got FRIED.  We rented a gas golf cart for the week to make our trips back and forth to the beach more enjoyable.

We enjoyed swimming in the ocean the first day or two, but after that we settled for castle construction since it was a little chilly. Patrick was always right there with the others, digging and playing in the sand.

William loves to build castles designed to withstand the incoming tide as long as possible.  The first few days we accidentally built our castles too high up the beach, so the high tide never destroyed them (it is odd seeing your kid nearly cry because his castle didn't get destroyed by the waves!).  So finally I took the kids out at low tide to build up-close to the water so we'd be sure the tide would come chase us.  

William worked hard to try to fend off the rising waters.  For a time, his castle became a sort of beautiful floating island.

Here he is grasping the last armful of sand before it was also swallowed by the sea.  At this point he and Silas developed a fantastic story of rescuing the people of their sand castle kingdom.  Cockle shell ships ferried villagers and soldiers from the sinking castle to the safety of the shore.  Though there were 262 survivors, sadly thousands perished in the vast ocean.

  I love seeing my children playing together, imagining, and working as a team in their ficticious world.

Well, keeping constant track of these four sweet beings is an exhausting blessing.  Too bad I couldn't keep them safe in a pail for just a minute so I could close my eyes on the shore.

But seriously, taking pictures of the giant pail capturing the kids was fun :).

Explore, play, learn...

Here are the kids looking out at a family of raccoons passing by in the marsh.  On this trip we saw: bald eagles, alligators, raccoons, egrets, storks, herons, deer, blue crabs, hermit crabs, horseshoe crabs, coral, sand dollars and many shells, minnows... oh, and lots of mosquitoes.  

Storks and Egrets

There were plenty of (dead) horseshoe crabs to investigate.

Vera was the ultimate beach comber. Here are the hermit crabs she found along with ... sea pork, a colonial tunicate filter feeder (which took me many dead-end google searches to finally find).

We enjoyed our beach learning, but we were thankful and ready to come home to Daddy.