Visit To Beach – What to learn?

Till now every time we visited beach it was all about getting into water and enjoying the waves, making sand castle and collecting sea shell. And then coming back home. Occasionally we would see baby crabs coming out of sand after the waves have washed ashore.

 

 

 

Last month when I visited the beach with my little girl, we had planned for these activities. As soon as we arrived I noticed the sea water was very dirty, it was black in color. It could be because of rainy season as all the city drains that collect rain water open up into the sea. So there was no point getting into such muddy water.

After walking for few minutes, I noticed that 3-4 meters away from waves there were streams of clear water coming out of sand. Obviously this phenomenon was something I was tempted to share with my little girl.

So I took her to find out from where the water were originating. After a while we figured out it was coming out of the sand a little farther from sea water.

One could clearly see that layer of sand was actually filtering the muddy water. This was a perfect way to show how ground water gets filtered and becomes clear.

Since there were so many little streams, I also made her to experiment with changing the direction of flow of water by building a little bund using stones and shell. She was excited to notice that once you block the path of flowing water, it does finds different path to flow.

We also made a salt pan replica using sea water and boundary made by sand. This helped her understand how salt pan works.

We also collected some stones and I showed her how polished some of the stones were and in perfect shape as if somebody actually carved and polished these. She could understand that continuous flow of water over a period of time has changed the stones rough appearance.

 

 

Finally we collected lots of stones and shells for our craft work and returned home.

And I was wondering why I never leveraged beach visits to expose my kids to these concepts ealier.

Am glad I did it this time.

Do it with your kid and let me know how it goes.
Please note appropriate age for this activity is 7 plus. Am not sure if kids below this age will be able to understand about working of bunds and filtration process.

 

*Note : all picture borrowed from net, as we did not click any pictures .