LA 15 : Ocean in A Bottle

Lesson : Language Arts
Year : 3
Topic : From The Sea

This is what I did with my Year 3 students yesterday. Its a simple activity with quite small budget because all the things needed are in your house! Check this out!

What Do You Need?

• Empty bottles (any bottles, I used three boxes of mineral water bottle to cater my 37 students in this class)
• Food colouring or Watercolour (we used blue for the ocean)
• Sugar paper or foam papers (as in the photos above). You can also buy any sea creatures toys at the supermarket. I bought this about RM1.90 per roll from KK. Sadly, the thickness of this sugar paper decreased, not as thick as it used to be. :(
• Brand new cooking oil or mineral oil
• Scissors

How To Make It?

• Fill the empty bottles with water (half of the bottle would be fine).
• Put some blue colour in it to match with the colour of the ocean and put it aside.
• Cut the sugar papers into sea creatures that you want. Use different colour for different sea creatures. (as in the photo above).
• Put the 'sea creatures' into the ocean bottle.
• Pour ample cooking oil so that when you shake it, you'll see bubbles and the 'sea creatures' are swimming through it!
• Done!

Initially, I cut the sugar papers into square sizes to give them equally to each groups. I conducted this activity in groups of three but my students wanted more bottles to make it individually. So, I gave them more bottles, but they need to share the given sugar papers in the first place. They agreed and we continued making it more!

Some students might complaint that their ocean colour is not that blue. Well, I immediately said that our ocean here is very clear too, but it still the ocean though! Thank God, they are okay with it. Since this activity is an unplanned one for the students, they did not bring their own scissors, so teachers need to prepare with scissors too. 

Overall, the students have the freedom to create the sea creatures with different colour logically and some random colours for certain sea creatures. I drew the sea creatures on the whiteboard so that they are able to copy the drawings on the sugar papers. 

Since I did not bring enough cooking oil, I asked them to ask from their mom at home, but not too much. Ample to make bubbles when they shake the bottle as the price of cooking oil nowadays is pretty expensive. Well, that's it.

That's all for the class! Thanks for reading! :)