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Dolphin Tale Unit Study

The twins and I have been doing the unit study that came free from Homeschool Movie Club on Facebook to go along with Dolphin Tale (you can find this free curriculum at www.homeschoolmovieclub.com). We saw the movie during its opening in theaters back in September, but I didn’t want to do the study right then because the twins didn’t seem very excited about it. They liked the movie, but they didn’t want to do any school work based on it. I had it all printed out and put in a folder and just waited until the “right” time. Well, that time seems to be now.

I’m getting ideas for extension activities, such as a book from our bookcase called Friendly Dolphins that just happened to be laying on our coffee table the other day. I picked it up and started reading it to the twins a little later that day. Then I found an episode of Flipper on Netflix, so I had the twins watch it. Then I realized that Blockbuster Express has Dolphin Tale now, so I rented it two nights ago, and we watched it last night.

Here are some of the worksheets that are included in the unit study curriculum from Homeschool Movie Club.

We made a water column. We added maple syrup and cooking oil to the water and observed where they collected. That part itself was fascinating. Then we started dropping other objects such as a rock, a packing peanut, a piece of tomato and some solid shortening. We drew a picture of where those things floated in the water on the Buoyancy Worksheet above. I forgot to take pictures of our jar. It was lovely. Take my word for it.

The twins were pretty good at figuring out the correct vocabulary words that went with the definitions.

Nematocyst – New vocabulary word for all of us. We had a real-life example of what these nematocysts are used for, thanks to Patrick. When he was at the beach, he was stung by a jellyfish, and he had some red marks and swelling on his leg that lasted a couple of days. I showed the twins how the tentacles are full of nematocyst cells which hold venom inside of them, and when they feel something, they send out a little harpoon and pierce the skin and pour venom into it. And that’s why Patrick’s leg was hurting and turned red and swelled. They were fascinated by that. Later that evening, Fiona drew pictures based on what she learned during the day. She drew a shark (we started a study on sharks that day, too) and a jellyfish. Out of one of the tentacles of the jellyfish she drew a nematocyst sending a harpoon. I showed it to Patrick later, and he said she should have drawn his foot right next to it. 🙂

These are the worksheets from the shark study that we’ve done so far.

Fiona drew the shark teeth from pictures we had. Garrett is having to write the names of the sharks they came from.

I’m learning more about sea creatures than I knew before.

I looked for books at the library to go with our study and found tons of books about sharks, but very few about dolphins. Huh, I personally like dolphins a lot better than sharks. But I’m finding lots of good information, thanks to Dolphin Tale and Homeschool Movie Club. You can also find out more about Winter, the dolphin that Dolphin Tale was about at www.seewinter.com. There’s a webcam set up so you can watch Winter. You can even watch her at night through night vision. How cool is that?

While watching this movie the second time, I was struck even more by the way this dolphin is touching the lives of disabled children and adults. God uses His creatures in amazing ways to save, heal, encourage and restore each other.

One Comment

  1. Types of Sharks, the image, the one above the last image. We found it on google images. Thank you for sharing this with us. It helped me teach my 5 year old daughter, named Indika, what different types of Sharks are, however she ended up teaching ME about them. Thanks for the template! Keep up the good work Kiddo

    Jeffrey and Indika Rynearson
    Oregon/Idaho

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