I spent the afternoon at the Monterey Bay Aquarium with my family. I did a little sketching with Zev (now 3yo) while we were there. He is particularly fond of jellyfish at the moment. I lost my paintbrush and only had his kids paints with so I was mostly finger painting. It was still fun though to compare different fish in the kelp exhibit.

Here’s a PDF of all of the compiled Axolotl and Tuatara Strips so you can read them, print them share them, whatever without having to search through the archives. axolotl-and-tuatara-demo

Ever have too much kids art? Not sure what to do with it? Send it to Congress!

I’ve started a new art project. Join me in creating positive civic engagement through art. It’s simple! We are decorating postcards with art and mailing them to our representatives. If you want to learn new art skills, make new friends, and teach our kids how to constructively participate in civics come join me!

KidsArtCongress.com                                Share your art on Twitter at #KidsArtCongress

Inspired by the ‘squid tickler’ attachment to the Doc Rickets ROV:
(to the tune of three blind mice)
Three aquatic robots, Three aquatic robots,
See how they swim, See how they swim,
They all chased after a jellyfish, They wanted to see if it would squish,
It made a sound like a “Ker-splish”
Three aquatic robots, Three aquatic robots.

Thanks to Philip (from Denmark) and his family for sending in a picture of their lunar lander! It’s great to see other families exploring science topics that interest them. Maybe, there are some future astrobiologists out there!

It’s time to share your results! Send us examples of experiments that you’ve conducted. Next week, I’ll post an assortment of the results. Please include a 1-2 sentence description of your experiment, an image of your results, the age of the researcher and your location (City, State). Email them to WalkaboutEm@gmail.com.

I look forward to seeing what everyone came up with!

Zev loves the bubbler in the fish tank. We have talked many times about how it’s dissolving oxygen into the water for the fish to breathe. We elaborated on that by reading a textbook diagram of fish breathing through gills and talking about how that compares to humans breathing. We watched a short video on YouTube about how gills work. Then we observed our minnows swim, specifically watching for them pushing water through their gills. For an art activity, I drew diagrams of fish, pointing out the operculum that covers the gills and named the types of fins.  After the kids colored their fish, I cut little slats in front of the mouth and at the operculum line. We pushed little blue pieces of paper in through the fish mouths and out through their gills, pretending that our fish were breathing.

The kids pretended to be fish swimming around and we sang a song (to the tune of Puff the Magic Dragon):
Puff the Magic Minnow lived in a tank.
He ate some plants and swam around,
and played with things that sank.

Materials – Paper (I used manilla envelopes, so they’d be a little sturdier and not rip), markers, strips of blue paper, diagram of fish gills or fish anatomy.