Titanic Unit Study–1st Grade
Baloo loves the Titanic. I don’t remember what sparked his interest in the great ship, but since then he has been infatuated with it. We read books about the Titanic all the time – he just cannot soak up enough information!
Our local museum had a Titanic exhibit come through and I thought they would be a great time to do some more intense learning about the Titanic. We stopped at the library and picked up as many books about the Titanic as we could find:
I had promised Baloo that we would go to the museum exhibit after we were done with our unit study – so he was really really excited when the day finally came. We managed to make it a mommy-son date, and it was just the 2 of us (thankfully because it was definitely not geared toward kids!). We both loved it! Baloo thought it would be more hands-on, but he still enjoyed the show. I thought they did an incredible job show what life could have been like at the time – I’d just suggest adding a kitchen with foods from the Titanic
If you have a chance to go to the Titanic Artifact exhibit, I highly recommend it! Naturally, we weren’t allowed to take pictures. They had this awesomely huge boat display outside though. That little tiny thing up in the top left corner? A life boat that would have help 65 people! That’s how huge the Titanic was!
Anyway, 95% of our unit study consisted of reading the Titanic books. We read, and read, and read. We really only did a few other activities.
Baloo was very curious about the iceberg and why they didn’t see it early enough. We decided to freeze a block of ice and float it in a little tub of water to illustrate how ice floats, but sits very low in the water.
Of course, our ice wasn’t shaped like an iceberg, but he could still see that the very top was barely out of the water!
We also got to see how fast it melted.
It shrunk this much after just a bit! We talked a bit about where icebergs come from and how they’re actually melting!
Baloo decided, on his own, to make a replica of the Titanic. There are only 3 smokestacks, but he knows that the 4th smokestack on the Titanic was actually just a dummy anyway! The pencils holding up the purple half egg is the crows nest. Baloo likes to drive his Titanic around and shout “Iceberg right ahead!”
Those little silver things on the back are the propellers.
I thought we were finished with our Titanic unit study, but Baloo is still insisting on reading Titanic books every day. Looks like I’ll be putting together a Titanic learning pack.
I like the Titanic model he built, it's very cute.