So our last day of Octopuses has come (Because we NEED to start Christmas crafts!) I made Monkey a tub of water and put all his Ocean creatures out around it for him to play with in the water. I added some white Lego pieces to be icebergs (but Monkey thought they were better as boats) His pirate Little Person also joined in the fun.
His Walrus' sat on the icebergs and then jumped into the water.
And of course, cars, trains, and helicopters ended up in the water too.
We then had our Octopus TP rolls to finish as well. The paint was finally dry, so all we had to do was glue the googley-eyes on, and cut the tentacles.
Didn't they turn out cut! Monkey didn't want to put smiles on them because in all the videos we couldn't see the Octopuses mouth, so he said they didn't have a mouth!!
Once we were all done making them, Monkey wanted to put holes in them and hang them up with the other "Silly Octopuses". So Monkey punched two holes in each one and we threaded them onto the yarn and added to our collection!
So we are done with Octopuses for now. But we still have to watch some videos every now and again! Octopuses are great for teaching many things. In the last 3 days, I have taught Monkey about Camouflage, the Ocean, counting to 8 (which was pretty easy for him), learning about tentacles instead of legs, the Letter O - plus had some great messy crafts to go along which helped with scissor skills!
So today was Day 2 of learning about Octopuses! Most importantly for Monkey, it was craft day! I had 2 octopus crafts planned for today. Both are the same idea, but done differently. We are going to making Octopuses with Toilet Paper rolls and with paper. We started with the toilet paper rolls because we had to paint them, and then worked on the paper ones while we were waiting for the paint to dry.
First thing we had to do was paint 4 TP rolls
I set out a variety of colours, because as we learned yesterday, Octopuses are masters of disguise! Monkey had blue, green, red, orange and pink to paint with.
Once he was done painting all the rolls, we put them aside so they could dry while we worked on the next set of octopuses.
However, Monkey started painting the paper....
...and then the finger painting started....
...and then the body painting started.... So we had to do a bit of a cleanup before we started the paper craft!
Ok, so I printed out this template on some card stock in different colours.
I thought that since I had printed on different coloured paper, that would be good enough, but of course it wasn't! Monkey coloured all the tenticles and, of course, the smiley face!
And then came the tricky part...Cutting along the dotted lines. Monkey really has trouble with scissors. He really wants to use both hands to cut, so I figure I will let him go with it for now and hopefully his hands will get stronger so he can use one hand.
Then we taped them together and VOILA! Super cute Octopuses!
Of course, like everything Monkey does, as soon as he was done he said "Lets hang it on the playroom wall" This is a little tricky with circular octopuses, but we came up with the idea to hang across the window with some string. So we cut the string to (almost) the right length and then we put 2 hole punches in each octopus. Monkey laced the string through the holes and then we tapes the ends up to the wall!
Now, the TP rolls took a whole lot longer to dry than I anticipated, so we are going to finish that one tomorrow. So stay tuned to see how they turned out!
While we were waiting for them to dry, Monkey asked to watch more Octopus videos. We found an ABSOLUTELY AMAZING video that you all need to see. The end (starting at 1:30 right until the final second of the video) is by far the most spectacular thing you will ever see...well maybe not ever be it is really COOL (as Monkey said)
Recently, a friend of mine posted a video on Facebook of an Octopus that heaved itself up onto the rocky beach, walked around, regurgitated a LARGE crab, and then casually walked backed into the ocean. Monkey watched the video with me, and then asked to find more videos about Octopuses. So we started on youTube looking for videos, and found some amazing ones! I decided that since Thursday is December 1st, we have 3 days that we can study Octopuses before we start our Christmas activities.
NOTE: The plural of Octopus seems to be really controversial! I looked in up on many websites! Seems like people use Octopuses, Octopusses, Octopi, octopods, octopoids, octopodes, octopussies etc etc etc! So I'm going with Octopuses!
Here is the video we originally saw. Especially pay attention at 2:07 of the video
We ended up watching youTube videos for close to an hour after seeing this one. I started reading him amazing stories about how Octopuses had escaped in Aquariums/Zoos to go to other tanks, eat the marine life in those tanks, and then go back to their own tanks as if nothing ever happened. We came across this interesting video of an Octopus that was actually eating sharks at the Seatle Aquarium in USA.
So I did some research and found lots of Octopus activities to cover over the next few days! First, I printed quite a few colouring pages, so we could colour them in different colours since Octopuses are the masters of camouflage. We talked about how they have 8 tenticles and they had no bones like us.
We got some good colourings from here and from here
Here are SOME of the pages we used.
Here Monkey is working on colouring inside the lines, something we are making a little bit of progress on.
Since we learned that Octopuses can change colours depending on what is around them, Monkey decided to colour each tenticle a different colour, well almost each tenticle :)
This Octopus picture conveniently had a turtle on it, so I had to use it!
After we coloured all the pages, Monkey decided he wanted to trace his hand. So we traced his hand and then he pointed out that it looked like an Octopus! So we turned it upside down and drew a face on it. This one I helped him with the eyes and mouth and tracing his hand...
But this one he did completely alone! (Hence the face is upside down)
We decided this Octopus was the best camouflaged one, since he could hide almost anywhere with colours!
Octopuses can be really great teaching tools. We learned about ocean animals, counting to 8 (tenticles), the letter O, colours and camouflage, that sometimes creatures can do things they aren't supposed to (walking on land) and we learned that animals are smarter than we give them credit for. Stay tuned for tomorrows Octopus crafts!
