This week’s theme:

Mysterious Places – The Ocean

Fact of the day:

Water and the sea play important roles in many legends and myths.

Resources list:

Paper, paint, tape; Right angle triangles; Bowl, water, tinfoil, weights, plasticine; Straw; Youtube; Card, sticks, lamp or torch, sheet; Bottle, veg oil, water, glitter or tinfoil shards.

Activity 1:

The Kraken was first mentioned in a 13th-century Icelandic saga, the sea-dwelling kraken is a terrifying monster. It can reach the top of a sailing ship’s main mast, wrap its many tentacles around the hull and capsize it. Historians say the legend derived from ­sailors’ eyewitness accounts of the giant squid which can reach 60 feet in length.

Make some artwork, similar to this of a Kraken’s tentacles rising from the depths of the sea to a boat on the surface. If you cut out tentacle shapes and lay (or slightly tape them down) them down to paint over, when you lift the cut-outs off, you will see your tentacles in relief like this artwork.

What’s the biggest thing in your house that you can wrap your tentacle arms around – do you think you could reach around a boat like a Kraken?

Activity 2:

The Bermuda Triangle. Many ships and planes have vanished without a trace in a triangle shaped area of the Atlantic Ocean between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. Wild theories have accompanied the disappearances, from magnetic activity to alien abductions.

Cut out a bunch of right-angle triangles, all the same size as each other (any square piece of paper cut in two diagonally will make a right angle triangle; try 10cm squares, or post it notes cut diagonally). You can cut these out from different textured materials (e.g. card, foil, kitchen roll, sand paper, coloured plastic bags, fabric). Can you slide, flip and rotate your pieces to ‘tessellate’ and make a triangle from 4 triangles? How big a ‘Bermuda Triangle’ you can make from smaller triangles tessellated like this – can it stretch from Miami to Bermuda?

Activity 3:

The sea can be described as the planet’s mega museum. There are more artifacts and remnants of history in the ocean than in all of the world’s museums combined! Around 1,000 shipwrecks lie off the Florida Keys alone. Other underwater museums include one in the Mediterranean for this submerged bronze statue.

In a bowl or tub, sink a tinfoil ship of your own by filling it with weights. Create an underwater world with lots of different underwater statues (made from plasticine, for example), then dive your hands in to explore it.

Activity 4:

You would either need to dive or take a submarine to explore the deep sea – what do you think each one would be like? Can you act it out?

Can you recreate any of these diver’s Scuba sounds try blowing bubbles under water through a straw.

This is an incredible video of a little submarine diving to hear whale song. How would you feel in this little sub? With your arms outstretched, try moving like the submarine, tilting left and right and diving deep down. Try making the sounds of the whales.

Try signing along to this Yellow submarine song.

Activity 5:

The Creature from the Black Lagoon was a fictitious monster in a 1954 film. Draw some scary sea monsters of your own, cut them out and make them into shadow puppets  to perform a dark shadowy sea monster play of your own. You can either shine a light/lamp/torch onto a wall to create shadows, or stand behind a white sheet with the light behind you to create shadows.

Activity 6:

In folklore, a mermaid is an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the scaly tail of a fish. Make yourself a Mermaid scales sensory bottle using water, a drop of vegetable oil and large flake glitter or tiny ripped up pieces of tin foil. Shake up the mermaid scale sensory bottle to mix up the ingredients; watching the contents move around may be a way to feel more relaxed.