This week’s theme:
Adventures through an underwater museum
This week’s colouring in sheet:
Download and print this week’s colouring sheet here.
Activities for the week…
Fact of the week: Under the ocean, accessible only to divers and snorkelers are museums full of sculptures, sunken cities, shipwrecks and film props.
Activity 1:
This week we’re adventuring to underwater museums so we’ll need some diving goggles – look in your recycling pile to find an empty clear fruit punnet that you can use as a diving mask. You could use some elastic, or ribbon to tie to around your head, or just hold it in place. You could grab a drinking straw to act as a snorkel tube too if you’d like.
Act out the action of putting on your diving gear – your mask, your fins/flippers, your wetsuit, and your oxygen tank, your gloves and boots, and your wrist compass. There’s a lot to carry on our bodies – does it feel light or heavy?
We’re going to dive deep into the sea – practice the actions of holding your breath to dive in, diving off the side of the boat, swimming, breathing slowly and calmly through a snorkel, un-steaming your mask by wiping it, flapping your flippers/fins.
What sound will you make when you first dive in? If you have a bucket of water to hand, recreate some diving sounds and splashes. What swimming sounds can you make in the water? Can you make any bubbling sounds like the sound from a snorkel?
Activity 2:
As we dive down to the underwater galleries and museums on the sea bed we might hear the sound of the SCUBA breathing gear we’re wearing close your eyes and listen to the underwater sounds, concentrating on your own relaxed breathing. This can be a calm, mindful moment to think about what other sounds you might hear while you’re underwater, and what stressful sounds you won’t hear down there since you’ve left them at the surface. Listen to the sounds for as long as you like.
Activity 3:
As we travel to the sea bed we might pass through some seaweed. If you have scraps of fabric, string, wool, shoelaces, clingfilm, tissue paper, loosely tie them dangling from your fingers. Move your fingers and touch it around to feel the sensation of seaweed tangling and passing around different parts of your body.
Activity 4:
Take a look at these underwater museums and galleries around the world:
The Museo Atlántico in Lanzarote
Christ of the abyss in Italy and in Key Largo, Florida.
Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park in Grenada is a collection of underwater contemporary art.
The underwater ‘Nest’ sculptures in Indonesia provides a home for soft corals and sponges, which in turn will encourage other marine life. This paves the way for delicate hard corals and eventually a fully established reef will form in, on, and around the artefacts.
M.U.S.A. (Museo Subacuático de Arte) in Mexico is one of the largest underwater art museums in the world, it features over 500 life-size sculptures.
Try and create the poses and shapes of some of the underwater artefacts. Imagine diving and swimming amongst them.
One of the statues in the underwater museum in Grenada appears to be using a typewriter or keyboard underwater. Imagine writing a letter home from the bottom of the sea, and trying to explain everything you’ve seen in these underwater museums. What would your letter say? What adjectives would you use?
Activity 5:
Make your own 3D sculpture from any material. Cardboard, paper, clay, recycling, wire, straws, tinfoil, playdoh, pipe cleaners. What will your sculpture be of?
Make a sculpture that could be submerged. Think about what materials are waterproof, and how you would keep them at the bottom of your water.
Activity 6:
The ancient sunken city of Baia has been turned into an underwater archaeological museum. The city of Baia was abandoned in the 8th century and then submerged underwater. Today it can best be explored by snorkelers and divers. The city was once a lavish seaside resort for rich Romans and emperors. Historians today compare it to Las Vegas or Beverly Hills. Underwater you can still visit the marble sculptures and touch the mosaic floors.
Design a holiday brochure for an underwater seaside resort.
Design some underwater mosaic floors using tessellated shapes.
Activity 7:
Underwater sculptures and artefacts are good for marine life as they provide a habitat for coral, sponges, limpets, barnacles, seaweed, and fish, amongst other species.
Play a game of musical limpets. While the music plays, swim or float about, or move like a limpet or barnacle, protected in a shell. When the music stops and the tide goes out, either hide in your shell, sucker to/cling to something close by, or freeze still.
Activity 8:
Some underwater museums only become visible at during high or low sea tides.
‘Another Place’ is a collection of 100 statues situated along the beach at Crosby, UK, based on the body of artist Sir Anthony Gormley. Some of the iron men stand proud, where others are up to their waist in sand. The statues are always changing; depending on the fall of the land, the ebb or flow of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of day the work will be more or less visible. At high water, the sculptures that are completely visible when the tide is out will be standing up to their necks in water.
Use your waterproof sculpture from Activity 5 and place it in a washing up bowl, or plastic tub, towards one side. Rock water away from the statue to signify low tide, when the water is far out at sea. Then slowly tip the water closer and closer to your statue as if the tide were coming in. When the high tide hits your sculpture, see what it looks like partially submerged, water creeping up it until it’s fully submerged. Slowly rock the water away again to re-enact the tides ebbing out again. Around the UK, there are mostly two high tides and two low tides each day, so any sculptures on a beach would appear and disappear under water twice a day.
Activity 9:
Some underwater museums can be viewed better when there’s changes in the rise or fall of river levels. When there has been more rain river levels rise as there is more water in them. When there is less rain, river levels fall.
‘Alluvia’ is an underwater statue in The River Stour, Canterbury, England. How clearly it can be seen depends on how deep the water is, and how much silt has been left by the rise and fall of the river’s water levels.
In the Thames in London there was a sculpture of horses that were revealed and then partially concealed by the rise and fall of the Thames river.
Using a piece of cloth such as a scarf, tea towel of pillow case, create a dance to this or this music. Gently make your scarves rise and fall, like a river slowly swelling with water.
Activity 10:
In this video you can see somebody Scuba diving with the Moai statue at Easter Island. The statue was used in Kevin Costner’s movie “Rapa Nui” and has since been placed there, underwater, as a site for people to dive at.
Imagine an underwater museum of props from films. What props from films do you think would make interesting underwater artefacts for people to visit? Would you dive to view the clock face from Back to The Future? Or swim around the tower from Tangled? Or snorkel alongside the Stay Puft Marshmallow man from Ghostbusters?
Draw some of your favourite film props and objects in an underwater scene.
Activity 11:
In Florida there’s an underwater museum of statues to honour military veterans. The Circle of Heroes features 12 life-sized statues of soldiers from all branches of the military.
Practice some military poses – for Sailors, Soldiers, Pilots, and Army Nurse, etc.
Stand to attention when somebody stops the watery-music stops, and make underwater dance moves while the music is playing.
Activity 12:
Read or ask somebody to read to you this Scuba diver poem. Add some actions and sounds. Add a verse about underwater museums and what you’ve seen there today.
Underwater communication is important & hand signals are the primary way divers communicate with each other. Try some Scuba hand signals (see this video for more). There’s also Scuba hand signals for marine animals – are any of these similar to the Makaton signs?
Activity 13:
There are also underwater museums featuring long lost underwater cities and shipwrecks
Herod’s Harbor was a city that once served as a trade port for the Roman Empire, it now lies 20 feet below sea level off the coast of Israel. Snorkelers and divers can examine such artifacts as marble columns, anchors, and shipwrecks.
Beneath the waters of the Black Sea near Crimea there’s a collection of thousands of discarded and unwanted busts and figures that once appeared on the streets of Russia.
Off the coast of Roatan, Honduras, snorkelers can spot authentic antiques, including 17th-century sundials, Spanish galleon ships and Mayan-era monuments.
Draw a ‘treasure’ map of an ocean, what hidden artefacts, lost cities, and shipwrecks are under the surface of the water on your maps?
Why not take a photo of any of the activities you’ve tried this week and share it with us? You can share it on our Facebook, Instagram or Twitter or send it to melanie@purplepatcharts.org and we’ll put it online for you!