Oceans Apart

Before the world changed its course, and we only homeschooled on a Friday, we often brought what Ferdy was learning at school to life with a day out.

Last week (sorry no time for a blog) for the first time in three months, our lessons on countries in Africa culminated in a trip to the zoo and searching for African animals.

All pictures by Ferdy and Gil

This week the focus has been on the oceans and journeys around the globe, but we decided that doing a trip out to see the ocean would not be a good idea: a) because we live as far away from the sea as is possible in the UK and b) because we did not fancy parking on a roundabout and relieving ourselves in peoples' gardens.

So we didn't go anywhere.

But hey, surely we have now realised that we can experience places vicariously through other people and animals in books, songs and films.

Luckily, Andy was doing a wild workout on the beach so we joined him. We read some lovely books about oceans, (and we couldn't read about oceans without learning about the tonnes of plastic amassing within them) and Ferdy wrote a piece about giant starfish in Flotsam. We sang Moana songs from the South Pacific, and we also found a catchy tune about how to remember the names of the oceans.

Best of all though, for our journey, we decided to follow and discuss the directions of some of the migratory routes of five different animal species: a blue whale; a leatherback turtle; a monarch butterfly; a red crab and an African elephant.

Plotting the migratory routes

When Ferdy enjoys doing something, he immerses himself fully into it. Fascinated by footage of the leatherback turtles emerging from their eggs on the coast of Costa Rica, he decided to write a diary entry by one. When I pointed out perhaps he should write the names of the Frigate birds who preyed on the turtles, who was his silly Mum to argue with the retort that this turtle has only just been born of course he doesn't know what the birds are or what the name of the ocean is...  Vicariousness indeed.