Florida: Manatee

Florida's official state marine mammal is the manatee. We have been studying this for the past few days.

We read the following books:

Sam the Sea Cow by Francine Jacobs

Manatee on Location by Kathy Darling

Manatee Winter by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld

The Manatee that Flew by John Oberleu

Florida Manatees by Meish Goldish

Does a Sea Cow Say Moo? by Terry Web Harshman

A Manatee Morning by Jim Arnosky

Mary Manatee by Suzanne Tate

We also made our first lapbook, using premade templates found at homeschoolshare.com Arin liked the lapbook, although it was a little advanced for her. I also added a few pages to the lapbook (a maze and a dot-to-dot page) that I found here.

We also painted doll pin type of clothes pins. Then, I cut out tails and fins, which Arin painted. We assembled the manatees, which were a little silly looking, but they served their purpose well. I wrote the numbers 1-6 on small pieces of paper and then I also wrote the words one through six on pieces of paper. I gave Arin a die and we took turns rolling it. When she would roll the die, she would attach her manatee to the correct number. When I would roll my die, I would attach a manatee to the correct number word. If that number/word were already used, we'd lose a turn. The first to use all of their manatees wins the game. Arin really liked this game and she also liked that she beat me two out of the three times that we played!