Night Creatures

Can you believe it is October 20th??? How did this happen? The year is flying by and this week was a doozy!

Well we went on our first field trip on Tuesday to the Moli'i Fish Pond on Kualoa Ranch.  If you are familiar with the show Lost, or these movies 50 First Dates or Jurrassic Park then you have seen Kualoa Ranch.

Kualoa Ranch is a private ranch that was established in 1850. It is a 4,000 acre cattle ranch that is family owned.  The picture above is from Lost.

This picture is from our Field Trip!! Crazy that I got the same exact view!!  This is actually a huge fish pond that the ancient Hawaiians fished and helped to take care of their community.  It is part of a system called an Apuhua'a.  Basically  the run off from the rain collected here before it reached the ocean.  The pond is filled with lots of different critters that help keep the system in balance.

I thought this would be a great field trip to start off our study of Habitats and Interdependence among plants and animals.

 

We started off the trip with a boat ride around the pond.  I forgot to take a picture of the boat since I was herding kids and hoping no one would fall in.

Our guide showed us the ancient rock wall that has lasted hundreds of years.

These are gates that are used to let in more fish when the pond is running low.

Our guide also told us that poachers sneak into the pond quite a bit and rig up lines on the gates to steal fish.

After our boat tour we got to look at some creatures from the pond and surrounding waters.

Can you guess what this is??

They are jellyfish!  I have never seen one so close or so big!  I had to really watch to make sure no little hands went in that tub!!

They did get to put their hands in this seaweed and hunt for little fish hiding in there.  After 30 hands grabbing and finding these little guys, I hope they survived to see another day!

We took a tour of the surrounding orchards which included mangoes, papayas, avocadoes, breadfruit and bananas.

The pond and surrounding areas were absolutely beautiful!  We ended our trip with

some quiet contemplation around the edge of the pond.

The kids had a great time and we were all exhausted when we got back!

In class the day before we had talked about Pond Life and created some webs to help us focus more on our trip. 

It was a great way to start off our Habitat study with a twist.  I decided this year to focus on Nocturnal Animals in all of the different habitats.  I thought it would be fun since Halloween is upon us and kids love learning about night creatures.

We plan to cover one habitat a week and learn all about the nocturnal creatures in each one.  I hope we have enough time to get through it!  The culminating activity will be to let my students choose their favorite creature and write a research report. 

All of my ideas for this are in my latest creation.

 It is jam packed full of ideas and activities that you can use to teach habitats.

If you are interested just click on the pic to check it out.  I love my faithful readers so I will send it to the first 3 people who leave me a comment and their email.

Hope you made it through this long post!! I plan to post more of our fun ideas as we continue our night creature study.