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 Smile
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!

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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.
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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!
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We also got to see how fast it melted.
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It shrunk this much after just a bit!  We talked a bit about where icebergs come from and how they’re actually melting!
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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!”

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Those little silver things on the back are the propellers. 
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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.

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