LCA Ocean Discovery for September

This is another aspect of the learning environment at Lighthouse Christian Academy.  Since we live on an island and have access to the magnificent ocean life, it is only logical to include it in what is taught at the Academy. Our teachers are taking what we know about the ocean and incorporating it into the other areas of the classroom. For example, our Dramatic Play area has sea creature puppets. The Dress Up section has swimming masks and flippers. Creative Art is being done with sand, seashells, foam sea creatures, etc.  Our classroom libraries have books with ocean pictures and stories.  Each month we teach a different topic.

This month our ocean adventures take us to discover Corals and Barnacales:

Corals

Although they look like rocks or plants, corals are really tiny animals.  A single coral animal is called a polyp.  Coral polyps live together in large groups, called colonies.  A colony can have millons of coral animals.  There are two main types of coral: soft and hard.  Hard corals can form coral reefs, which can grow quite large – like ours about 5 miles away from Key West.

Barnacles

Barnacles are crustaceans that have jointed legs and shells of connected overlapping plates. Instead of crawling after food, they glue themselves to rocks, ships, pillings, abalones, and maybe even whales and wait for food to wash by. When barnacles are under water or when a wave washes over them, they reach out little feathery barbed legs to strain out plankton and absorb oxygen. A barnacle’s fertilized eggs hatch into larva, then they leave the parents’ shells. They spend their youth swimming. After many molts they settle down to adulthood, held permanently by one of the strongest known natural adhesives. The barnacle’s enemies are worms, snails, sea stars, fish like sheephead, certain shorebirds, and oil spills. Some are parasites inside crabs or in other animals