While one of the best parts of homeschooling can be all the many field trips some times getting out isn’t possible that day but there are still options! I wanted to share some ideas we have been using this week for virtual field trips!
Our adventure this week started with Shark Week and the new live webcam that the National Aquarium put up in their brand new Black Tip Reef exhibit. My not so little family has been waiting months for this exhibit to open so we could go see all the changes. Our tickets for a Member only night though were not for a bit longer and as homeschoolers we love to prepare for things.
I set up the webcam on one of the desk top screens in our living room and then just sat and counted the sharks I was seeing on the screen. I didn’t ask the children to come over, I didn’t make a big deal about it. TIP: This is one of my parenting tips as well, when ever you want your child to find interest in something, find interest in it first yourself and then look busy! LOL
Sure enough, within moments I have three little heads pushing in front me and memorizing by what they saw. Soon I had a million questions being asked and I wrote them down as quickly as I could. I found that if I wanted to answer them, it might help to have screen shots of some of the things the kids where asking about. You can teach your children to take screen shots too. Most computers you can take a screen shot using the PRTSC button on the top right of your keyboard. For mine, I also have to hit the FN Button at the same time near the bottom left. Here are a few of our screen shots!
Above photo is of three blacktip reef sharks and a fish that the kids nicknamed Square.
This sparked research into the blacktip sharks and we found that episodes from 2011 Shark Week free to watch for Amazon Prime members online helped us learn more about them. TIP: Unlike most field trips, virtual ones like this offer a lot of time to create entries in science journals to hold all the questions and facts and observations of the children.
MATH: This was great for practicing practical Math for our kindergartener and our toddler. Of course we had to help with logic about how the sharks could be circling that small area over and over and so our numbers could be really wrong so the idea was to try to count as many sharks on one screen in any given moment also aware that other sharks might not be on the screen. Our 7 year old son was sure there had to be more than 10 sharks in the 260,000 gallon tank.
Another part of Math is learning about time. If you keep this cam open for a few days as we have then the kids can record when certain things happen such as when divers can be seen in the tank and when feeding times seem to be!
When the divers first showed up I was not near a computer to see them. A scream went through my house as little kids got excited over seeing something new. I cam running to think something was wrong, just divers feeding fish and adding many more questions from the kids.
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