France ~ Jacques Cousteau

As part of our French unit we spent a brief amount of time looking more closely at the very famous French Scientist and Conservationist Jacques Cousteau.  What an interesting man!

We began simply by chatting about him as  I wanted to find out what knowledge the kids already had.  Which as it turned out was very little. I grew up watching Cousteau so for me that was a little sad to see.



I played this brief video clip to give everyone a broad over view of his life and a glimpse at some of his accomplishments and then it was time for the picture book component.

This part of our France unit was created for the primary aged children in the group so I hunted a picture book to use as our spine.

I chose this particular book because of the simple flow of text. I only had one hour and I knew I wanted to include some art work, I needed a book that would get across what I wanted but that didn't take an exorbitant amount of time to read.

My other reason for choosing this particular book, were the stunning illustrations. They are pieces of art themselves. In fact, in the end these are what I used as our inspiration for our art activity.

Whilst there were a few steps involved in creating these each step is a simple process. If you have the time I'd probably recommend you complete these over a couple of days though. It was quite a big job to tackle all of this in one block of time.

I made sure to purchase the heavier weighted water colour paper in A3. I knew we would be using plenty of very wet paint and given the general heavy handedness of most young children we needed a thicker paper to ensure it didn't tear during the process.

First up I had the kids draw wavy ocean like lines across their pages in white oil pastel. Yes you can't see them and that is on purpose. I simply told the kids they needed to wait for the surprise.

Next up was to paint the entire page to appear as though it is under the ocean, so we used a combination of blues and greens. All in water colour paints that were heavily watered down as we only needed a muted effect for this. Now their wavy ocean lines will start to show through.

As soon as the page was covered in paint and before it had a chance to dry we sprinkled salt across it. This is a trial and error thing to attempt. The idea is that when the salt combines with the paint and slowly dries it will cause little bursts of colour to appear on the page. This worked better on some pages than on others.

Once it is all completely dry you can simply brush off the excess salt.

Whilst our backgrounds were drying we set about organising our chosen Cousteau divers. To save time I had already traced some of these images from the picture book pages. The kids simply chose the design they preferred and cut out their own versions.

They then set about painting and colouring them as they wished.

Whilst our divers were drying we needed to get to work on some of the smaller finishing pieces. Things like seaweed, fish , shells and all manner of objects that one would find whilst diving.

This part was completely free form and the kids simply played around with their own ideas and drawings.

Once everything was dry and neatly trimmed we glued it all onto the background sheet.

Whilst this was a huge task to try and tackle in a single hour the kids did an awesome job and they turned out way better than I could've imagined.

Be sure to pin this so you can easily find it again later!

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More Cousteau Activities

Ticia over at Adventures in Mommydom used this exact same book but used it to encourage her kids to design an underwater home. Way cool, and it would make a great activity to include in a unit on this fabulous man! 

More France Themed Ideas

Our study of the Eiffel Tower
Our time with Madeline
The Glorious Flight 

Take a look at my France Pinterest Board for even more ideas for your France Unit Study

More Ocean Themed Ideas  

10 Easy Ocean Diorama Crafts

Oceans Of The World

Ocean Lapbook

Take a look at my Oceans Pinterest Board for even more ideas for your Ocean Unit Study

Have a blast learning more about Jacques Cousteau and our amazing oceans!

Happy Homeschooling,
Kylie

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Ten Easy Ocean Diorama Crafts

This was another fabulous fun filled activity done with friends! We gathered over a three week period, each time for close to a full day and immersed ourselves in all things to do with Ocean Life!

As always each adult/family prepared activities and this time crafts to go along with our activities, covering a myriad of Ocean dwelling creatures. As we worked our way through the creatures, learning some pretty cool things along the way we captured them in the form of a simple craft.

The grand plan was to create a diorama to house them in. All of the kids also have a massive lapbook showing all of the cool stuff they learned but I wanted to show you inside our diorama's, they were so simple and tackling them this way made the task very doable.

The majority of the crafts are all very self explanatory, here a picture really does tell a thousand words. Our egg cup Jellyfish! The kids painted their egg cups, some added googly eyes and for tentacles we used ribbon tape, hot glued to the inside of the egg cup.

This little guy, our resident deep water Dragon Fish, was found via Google, although I can't find the link now that I want to share it with you. The original was made from a toilet paper roll, but that was simply too large for our project.

Here we cut a piece of card, rolled it to form a tube roughly 1cm in diameter and 4cms long. His tail and fins are tissue paper, crumpled for the tail and folded accordion style for the fins. Add some googly eyes (every ocean creature simply must have googly eyes) and a bead attached to a piece of craft wire for his little dangly thing.

Our cute little Green sea Turtle, once again an egg cup carton craft. His body is made of one single piece of craft foam. Far too fiddly gluing on seperate head and feet pieces. I simply drew the body shape by hand, using his 'shell' as a guide for sizing. Once I was happy with it, I traced the body several times for all of the kids.

Again, held together using a hot glue gun. This is a must for creating a project like this one. Makes the job so much easier and holds everything together nicely.

 

One of the mums had the cool idea of adding a whale to the background of the diorama. Here she searched google and found a simple colouring page template, they look very cool inside the finished piece.

The little egg cup crabs are delightful and each of the kids came up with their own spin on them as you can see in the images at the end of the post. Pipe cleaners, egg cartons, paint and of course googly eyes. Really couldn't be simpler.

Our Octopus, gave us a bit of challenge, when it came to attaching him to the box of the diorama. Until some one came up with the neat idea of hot gluing him straight to the top. He is simply a small styrofoam ball, painted, with pipe cleaner tentacles and don't forget the googly eyes lol!!

No ocean is complete without Sea Anemone's. Ours are a little on the largish size, you get giant one's way down below, don't you?! I was very concerned that this little craft was going to be a flop with the group, simply paints, fluffy pipe cleaners and half styrofoam balls, they loved it and thought it was a pretty cool looking anemone!

Whilst all the crafts are oh so easy, these are simply so simple that we nearly overlooked them. Twisted pipe cleaners on a pencil for seaweed or funky coloured coral. Glued to the base of the box with the trusty hot glue gun.

I grabbed a pack of cheap green kitchen scourers for this one, the kids cut them up to make another variation on seaweed.

Mr Lego Lover added this neat looking eel to the pool of ideas. Two pipe cleaners twisted together and the addition of eyes is all you need.

Whilst all of the diorama's had very similar creatures housed within they all have their own distinct style depending on who created them. Master 11 painted his ocean floor yellow and added glitter to it for an extra sparkle.

Master 5 brought his ocean floor right out to the edge (the lid is underneath) of the lid. Everything is glued in place though so he can still put the lid on the box for easy storage.

Miss 9 chose the authentic effect of raiding sand from the sand pit to complete her ocean floor.

This really was a fabulous exercise, it was quite involved and we spent a fair amount of time learning about and completing mini books on all of the animals, but working together with other families simply took any of the hard work out of it. I personally only prepared for 3 of the ocean animals yet the kids have an awesome looking diorama and a lapbook brimming with all of the fun info they covered!

This exercise really reminded me that we might be homeschooling but we certainly don't need to be doing this all on our own.

Bambino Academy - Play Things

This was a quick simple piece to put together, if I can do it, anyone can do it! Thanks to this blog for first showing me how, although it's so simple you really could figure it out on your own.

C now has an Underwater Felt Play Mat.

Materials I used:

1 Piece of A4 sized Green Felt (seaweed)
1 Piece of A4 sized Tan Felt (sand/ocean floor)
1 Oversize (roughly A3) Piece of Blue Stiffened Felt (ocean)
Iron On Fuse Webbing (from the sewing department)
1 Tube of Ocean Life Creatures ($10 from Toyworld)

Not picture but also required:

Scissors
Lead Pencil
Iron

** I chose stiffened felt simply because that was all they had in the size I wanted. It easily slides into the cupboard, but if you would prefer to roll it away be sure to find regular soft felt for this.


Putting It All Together:

This didn't even take half hour to do!

1. I roughly drew the sand across the bottom of the Tan Felt. Since it was A4 I needed to do this twice, one piece slighlty shorter than other. Be sure they are the same height so that once they are attached the sand flows evenly across the ocean floor. You will have a join in your sand doing it this way, but I didn't mind.

2. Cut a piece of Iron On Fuse Webbing as close to the same size as the sand you just cut as possible. Place the sand onto the webbing and iron carefully with a dry iron so it attaches. Peel the backing away and place sand into position on the ocean floor area of the large bule felt piece and iron once again.

Do the same thing with the 2nd piece of sand, you will need to be a little more careful with the second piece, ensuring that your joins match up and that you are covering to the edge properly. You can use the iron to 'spread' the felt a little, mine was actually a couple of millimetres too short but I pushed the felt with the iron to move it across.

3. With the Green Felt piece roughly draw a few pieces of Seaweed and cut them out. You could fuse these into place but I chose not.

4. Add your animals.

5. Introduce your child to their new world of fun.

C played with this all day on and off the first day I put it together. I love that for now it is as simple as just as a play mat but it will grow with him. For now we can tell stories, sing songs with and about the animals.

Later on I will be able to put together 3 part cards for these creatures for him to first learn their names, label them and then go on to learn more about the individual creatures themselves.