"Creep into the Deep" Expo / Museum Walk

We had an absolutely amazing Expo / Museum Walk on Thursday, December 21st. The Winter Solstice, the longest night, was the perfect date for this... as all of the exhibits were (fittingly) in the dark by 5 pm when the parents, friends, and other guests arrived.

This was a Science Club project put together by a group of seven children (6-9 year olds) and they were justifiably proud of all of their hard work!!!

Enjoy your walk through our Museum!

Click on any photo to enlarge it and scroll through all the pictures with ease.

the welcome sign on the front door,
decorated with fish printing (rubber fish from Dick Blick)

seal fact cards accompany artwork

the five zones of the ocean:

Epipelagic (Sunlight)

Mesopelagic (Twilight)

Bathypelagic (Midnight)

Abyssopelagic (Abyss)

Hadalpelagic (Trench)

this friendly little diver accompanied folks on their tour of the ocean

signs also directed our guests

dolphin exhibit (Folkmanis hand puppet)

dolphin fact cards

a few bonus facts about Narwhals from the

Princeton Encyclopedia of Mammals

our coral reef display

layers of dyed coffee filters and cotton swabs

with toilet paper tube sea anemones

Zac's playstands make the perfect display space

fish dart in and out of our coral reef

drawn with window crayons behind the display

the sunlight zone is the only zone to have plants...

our dyed pompom yarn seaweed hangs from the ceiling

an assortment of water from around the world for our guests to taste:

France

Norway

Italy

Fiji

* * * there are many waters but it's all one water * * *

our two displays for the wall of water facts:

a bin of water and floating coconuts

a tote bag of flour and cornmeal weighing 22 lbs

one side of the chalkboard displays our graph
created using information in One Well: The Story of Water on Earth

average daily water use in countries around the world, measured in buckets

average daily water use per person in North America:
 55 buckets

do you think you would use that much water if you had to carry it?

WHY is our number so high?

on the other side of the chalkboard, used as a divider

between the sunlight zone and the twilight zone...

a pinkie-printed krill swarm overlaid with the Antarctic food web

the bioluminescence matching game
(invented by one of my students)

did you know that bioluminescence is the most common form of animal communication on the planet?

can you match the full-color animal pictures

with pictures showing JUST the parts of them that light up?

(yes, it is glow-in-the-dark paint)

our guests also had to put on glow stick bracelets at this station and wear them for the rest of their museum tour

welcome to the home of the giant squid

our life-size construction paper giant squid wrapped around the kitchen...

and headed up the steps...

and down the hall and wrapped around back towards us

eight 9-foot long arms

two 40-foot long tentacles

each covered in 2-inch wide suckers

 as the tentacles came to an end, they arrived at a map

little flags showed locations around the world where giant squid have been found washed shore

our display of books we read and resources we used to create our museum

the full-size eye (the size of a dinner plate) of the giant squid
courtesy of Actual Size by Steve Jenkins

fact cards for the giant squid and the sperm whale 

(they have mighty to-the-death battles in the pitch-black midnight zone)

 another midnight zone resident, the ping-pong tree sponge

heading down the steps into the library... and into the abyss

look down... do you know that you're stepping in ooze?

our construction paper collage sea lilies

a poster inspired by Down, Down, Down by Steve Jenkins

mono-printed bacteria using the Gelli printing plates

for the very brave, there was the crawlspace

aka the Mariana Trench

students mixed a custom color for these deep sea crustaceans
(above:  a close up view)

(below:  in real life, they are tiny because of the weight of the ocean water pressing down on them from above)

they also nailed up black fabric to create a backdrop in the crawlspace

a mysterious world

favorite science experiments were also set up downstairs for our guests

Penguin Camo

How Fat Helps Whales Stay Warm

Game with a Globe

Cornmeal Currents

Deep-Sea Currents

real beach glass... my gift to the students for all of their hard work

some students also made gifts for their parents...

a 2008 Creep into the Deep calendar!

(blank scrapbook calendars with 12 x 12 pages; here is my example one)

fish printing with pearlescent ink

cloud stencil

the air above, before we dive into the water below

every inch of artwork = 250 feet of depth

by the end of the artwork for all twelve months we will be 36,000 feet down

(the deepest part of the ocean)

January

sunlight zone:  the seal

we ended of course with a reception... yummy food... happy chatter...

and an invitation for families to borrow books from our resource table!

full list -- with links to every day's activities, all books, all art project supplies, and all experiments -- is found on my website at the Ecology page

highly recommended viewing:

A Plastic Ocean

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