Beach Explorations

Home schooling is in full swing in our house finally. At the moment for science the kids and I are working with a friend of mine and her daughter learning about the beaches and oceans. Including the animals. About a week ago we were having some nice low minus tides so we drug the kids out early in the morning to check out what we could see in the tide pools.

Here is a photo of all the kids looking down into a tide pool.

Here was a sea anenome. The kids think these are pretty cool. They like to when you touch the tentacles that they pull back towards the body. Sometimes they even spit water!

Here is Madison showing us one of the sea shells she found. We refer to it as a China cap but really it's a Limpet. She likes these little shells.

Here is one of the many purple sea stars we find on the beaches around here.


Here was an interesting crab in one of the lower tidal areas. We more often see smaller purplish crabs that run away. This one was a little bigger and was waving it's arms at us like he wanted to fight.

Kenzie holding one of the more common little crabs in our area.

Kenzie holding something, I can't remember what. She was asking my friend what it was.

Joshua walking on the rocks looking for something intresting.
Here are 3 tiny baby sea stars stuck on a piece of shale rock on the beach. There were tons of them underneath the rocks all over the beach.

I have tons more pictures but couldn't put them all up but we have had fun with this unit so far. The kids especially like the field trip part of it.

Joshua and Kenzie are doing well so far this year with their first year home schooling. Madison and Izzak are back into their mode of doing school every day although the other two kids being home is a little more of a distraction for her so we are working on that. Joshua is doing well at getting most of his daily work done. Getting anything done is better then last year in school when he didn't actually do any work the entire school year.

We are also studying Alaska state history till about the middle of November when we will turn to famous Americans for everyone except Joshua who is studying Ancient Egypt and Greece for a bit after the Alaska unit.