Saturday, May 7, 2011

Kids Craft: Rough Skinned Sharks



Though we live far from their natural habitat, we can study sharks at close range whenever our family visits the aquarium at the Omaha zoo.  We also learn about sharks via books, such as Shark Attack! by Cathy East Dubowski.  Since my daughters and son are so fascinated by sharks, why not make some?  In doing so, we learned about different types of sharks and about the denticles on their skin.   These tiny teeth-like structures cannot be easily seen, but we can imagine what they might feel like after creating textured sharks.





Materials:

  • Sandpaper
  • Scissors
  • Crayons
  • Paper (not thick)
  • Shark printables (we used coloring pages from the Georgia Aquarium)


Directions:
  1. Print out or trace outlines of shark shapes onto regular copy paper.
  2. Place rough sandpaper under the paper with the shark outline.  Use the side of a crayon to color the shark, pressing down so that the texture of the top paper becomes rough.
  3. Cut out the sharks, feel the rough skin, and display.

Additional resources:


If you are looking for further information or lesson ideas, the Seaworld website has a helpful downloadable resource for teachers (and parents I assume), Rough Rubbin' Sharks, which I consulted before we made our sharks.

Check out Kids Get Crafty for many more creative project ideas.
This idea is also linked to Show and Tell at ABC and 123.

5 comments:

Jessie said...

Thank you for stopping by my blog!

I love your shark activities. I will have to try these with my herd of children.

Anonymous said...

Just a quick note to let you know that a link to this post will be placed on CraftCrave today [08 May 01:00am GMT]. Thanks, Maria

RedTedArt said...

Oh how fun to add the "rough skins" to your sharks. What a clever idea! I bet the kids loved it!


Thank you so much for linking to Kids Get Crafty! Much appreciate your visit!

Maggy

Ticia said...

I'd totally forgotten about sand paper coloring. I need to have my kids do this as part of our sharks study!

CatCat said...
This comment has been removed by the author.