Fish (Week 10)

What's It like to be a fish?

We are finishing up our Day 5 of creation by learning about how God designed the fish perfectly to live in its environment.

Through this book, we learned that fish are best suited to live in the water.
They are cold blooded animals which means that their body temperature is directly affected by its environment.  (Don't place your goldfish in the sun)
Fish have seven fins that help them swim in the water.
Fish have scales that protect their skin from abrasions but also has slime which keeps the bacteria from infecting the fish.
Fish breathe oxygen like we do, but they use gills to filter out the oxygen from the water.  When you see a fish's mouth moving, they are actually breathing.
Fish do not have eyelids so when they sleep, they sleep with their eyes open.  They don't need eyelids because the water keeps their eyes moist.

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We practiced as a class opening and closing our mouth as a fish does to breathe.  When the fish closes its mouth, the water runs over the gills and it filters out the oxygen for the fish.

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Fish Gill Demonstration

To demonstrate how fish gills filter out oxygen, I used a pint mason jar, a coffee filter, rubberband, water and some dirt.  You can also use coffee grounds also, I just have more dirt around my house than coffee grounds. (haha)
Place the coffee filter on the jar and secure with a rubberband.  
Place the dirt in the cup with the water.  No need to mix.
Pour a little of the dirt/water mixture over the coffee filter and observe what happens.  The dirt is left behind while the water falls through.  In a way, the coffee filter is representing a fish's gills, it is filtering out the dirt like a fish would filter out the oxygen for them to breathe.

Observing a fish

Since my husband believes that fish are a gateway pet (haha), we do not have any fish as pets so I brought in a whole fish from the grocery store for the kids to observe.
We pointed out and named all the fins, looked and felt what the scales were and saw the skin of the fish.  We opened up the head cavity where the gills would be.
Opened their mouth and saw its little teeth.
Looked at the open eye.

Making a paper plate fish

To reinforce the parts of the fish that we learned about, I had the students make a paper plate fish with all the fins, scales, and gills.
I had the students color their parts first.  We were thinking of some fish we knew and the Rainbow Fish is something that most of the students were familiar with so many colored theirs like a rainbow.  One student colored theirs like a yellow tang.

This student is doing a very meticulous job on the scales coloring each scale a little blue and a little purple to show how they change color in the light.  He was telling me it was all about the 'details'
Wonderful!

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Finished Fish!

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Here is a simple template for the paper plate fish.

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