Review: Dive Into Your Imagination

I mentioned in a previous post that the kids and I are working on a unit study about the ocean. As part of the TOS Review Crew, we were recently provided with some pretty fantastic curriculum to review called Who Lives in the Sea? by Dive Into Your Imagination.

Dive Into Your Imagination was created by Annie Crawley, (aka, "Ocean Annie," ) an underwater photographer, motivational speaker, and and dive instructor.

We were sent 2 products, the Who Lives in the Sea?  DVD, ($19.95, for ages 3-8, 45 minutes in length) and the accompanying curriculum guides ($69.95, for each individual PDF. ) On the website, you'll find several other DVDs, books, and other related merchandise, as well as to an option to buy the full set of printed curriculum guides for each DVD for $299. You'll also find coloring pages, and links to other resources and articles. It's a wealth of information.

The DVD was broken up into several topical sections, ("Let's Swim with Dolphins," " Turtles: Dinosaurs of the Sea," etc.) The sections are short, but full of beautiful, colorful footage, and cram packed with information. I doled out the sections one by one with my kiddos, so we could focus a little deeper on each topic, and take full advantage of the curriculum guides. The kids were begging to watch more. That says a lot.

The curriculum guides were unbelievable. (There were two, one for pre-k through k aged children, and another for grades 1-3.) Each was well over 300 pages long, and included DVD transcripts, lesson plans, worksheets, and many, many cross curricular activities for a fun, all inclusive unit study. I liked that there were a variety of learning styles represented in the activities. (You'll find there are plenty of hands on activities for wiggly kids like mine.) The PDF format is easy to read, and easy to print. The educator guides add immeasurably to the already fun, informative DVD.


I expect that when we finish our unit, the kids will have a deep, lasting knowledge base, and probably a lifelong interest in the ocean.


My only reservation about these products is that they're costly. Most homeschool families I know of are on a pretty tight budget, and these curriculum guides would represent a sizable chunk of our curriculum budget.
Annie is offering a fantastic promo to readers of TOS, and blog readers of the TOS Crew Members, though. If you order the Who Lives in the Sea? , What Makes a Fish a Fish? or Dive into Diversity DVDs, and mention that you are a homeschooler in the comment section of the order form, she will gift you the fantastic corresponding educator guides for free. That may be the best 20 bucks you'll spend this summer!

To find out what other homeschooling families thought of these products, check out the linky on the TOS Review Crew Blog.


Disclosure: I was provided with a free DVD and curriculum guides to facilitate this review. All opinions are my own. All prices are accurate at the time of this posting. 

We're Studying the Ocean

We're tying up some loose ends here in our homeschool. L is on track to finish up his first grade work in the next week or so, which is amazing, really, when I consider how much time I've spent sick this year. We'll take maybe a week off, and then dive into second grade, with V doing some preschool work as well.

In the meantime, we've started a unit on the ocean, which may take up the better part of the summer. We're landlocked, here in north Texas, but we've planned some field trips to the aquarium, the fish store, and maybe a fish market.

Our kitchen renovation is at that horrible stage where we have stuff all over the house, so I've moved us to the back porch for school, until the kitchen is done, or it gets too hot to tolerate, whichever comes first. (We have finally gotten the cabinets ordered, and we're hoping to finish up in the next month or so.)

I put up some ocean themed fabric over the windows for fun, and set up a little activity center with shells and shell identification books, among other things.

Ocean activity center.

Since we don't have a real beach, we fabricated a pretend one, shown here, with seashells and sand toys.

Sand box "beach."

We're relying heavily on the awesome DK Eyewitness books and movies, as well as another great DVD series which I'll be reviewing shortly.

As usual, Pinterest is bursting with cool ocean themed ideas. (You can check out my ocean themed Pinterest board here.)

Fishing for Letters

Here's my version of the ever present magnetic fishing game. I made mine out of fun foam, which technically means you can play with them in the bathtub, or the pool, or a basin of water. They'll float. I wrote the letters with fabric paint, and attached a metal paper clip. For the pole, I actually just used the Dollar Tree fishing poles leftover from the fishing games the kids played at V's party.

The kids fish out a letter, and then we discuss what the letter is called, and what sound it makes.

Several other ideas I had were

*Make each fish a different color, and then go fishing for colors with your toddler.

*Go fishing for shapes.

*Go fishing for numbers.

The kids liked this one, and played with it a good while. L requested that I make another set of letters, so he could spell words with them in the future.

Ocean Themed Sensory Box

I put together this sensory box for the kids recently, to go along with the ocean unit study we've been working on for several weeks. I dyed the rice blue, put it in a large, lidded container from Dollar Tree, threw in three packages of Dollar Tree sea creatures, (fish, sea stars, and crabs and lobsters,) a couple of shells, and a few Play Mobil mermaids.
Seriously, I've been really surprised how much the kids have played with this. They ask for it daily. They like to bury and find the animals, they use the shells as scoops, and we've been playing informal little games, like "find something that's purple," or "find a crab."

I've made several other versions of this which I'll be posting about later.

Hello again./Fishy party

A while back, I decided to take a break from the blog. At the time, I thought it would be permanent. What can I say, here I am again.

Thanks to those of you who have hung around. Hopefully you can look forward to finding some more useful posts from me on a pretty regular basis.



On that note, here are some pics and details from my daughters second birthday party. I chose a fishy/ocean theme, and made many of the decorations.

The fabric drapes were fabric I had just lying around, believe it or not. If I had had to go buy some fabric, I probably would have went with some blue tulle.


I hung paper sea creatures (traced from coloring books, clip art, etc, because I can't draw,) from crepe paper streamers.
I hot glued seashells onto white twinkle lights, and hung them around the dining room.
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I crocheted lots of little octopus finger puppets, to decorate the tables, and for the kids to play with. The free pattern is located here:

http://suzies-yarnie-stuff.blogspot.com/2009/08/suzies-octopus-finger-puppet.html

I also scattered around ocean themed sand molds and squirt toys, purchased at Dollar Tree.

Elsewhere in the house, I blew up dozens of blue balloons, and let the kids throw them, and kick them around. I found some large inflatable fish (pool toys,) at Big Lots, and threw them among the balloons. The kids played a magnetic fishing game I picked up at Dollar Tree, and colored in a giant sea themed coloring book.

The cupcakes were decorated with Nemo gummies, crushed graham crackers, and fruit roll up seaweed. My inspirations were an old issue of Family Fun magazine, and this post, from one of my favorite blogs:

http://pinkandgreenmama.blogspot.com/2010/03/birthday-party-highlights-fishy.html



I served gummi sharks, Swedish fish, and Wilton's candy melts, molded into seashells, as well as fishbowls full of goldfish crackers.

I unfortunately forgot to take a picture of the felt goody bags I made, with seahorse appliques. They were filled with squirt toys, bubbles, fishy stickers, and colorful melt and pour soap, in the shape of seashells.


The party was a success, in spite of the fact that there were more than thirty people in our 1000 square foot house. Eek. My husband and I both have large families.
I spent several months working on the decorations here and there, so it was fairly time consuming, but it wasn't terribly expensive, since I shopped my own craft stash as much as possible, and filled in the blanks with mostly dollar store items.