Sharks!
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| Adventure Aquarium, Camden, NJ |
We have been studying sharks...
...and so when I saw this shark jaws craft at Dollar Store Crafts, I thought it might be fun for the boys to do. In our reading about shark's teeth, we learned that sharks have several rows of teeth, one behind the other.
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| Student's notebook page |
"When a front row tooth breaks, a new one from the row behind it move up to take its place."
Exploring Creation with Zoology 2, Fulbright
With that in mind, we made our shark jaw models with three layers of teeth.
To make shark jaws, use three paper plates. Chinet style plates tend to work well because they are smooth and sturdy. Fold your paper plate in half "backwards" (with the bottom of the plate facing you, and the folded edges coming toward you). Using scissors trim away the outer edges of the plate in a sweeping arched "M" design on the top half and bottom half, which should leave it looking like the hinges on the jaw, and the "m" shaped bottom and top of the mouth. The boys had to carefully look at pictures of shark mouths to get the idea of the shape, which is why I sometimes like to do science crafts. It helps them to focus on the particular aspect you are examining.
Cut out a large oval from the middle, and then work from that center to cut out free-form teeth that follow the inside arc of the paper plate on the top and bottom. This is where the boys actually did better than I because mine tended to come out too uniform. Shark teeth are often quite irregular and jagged and not always parallel.
Make three of these shark jaws. Bend the teeth of the inner most plate (plate closest to you if you were holding the jaws so that they faced other people) slightly inward. Keep the middle plates' teeth fairly straight. Bend the outermost plate's teeth slightly outward.
Now you have three sets of teeth in a shark's jaw! You can glue the rims together to keep them in place.
You can paint your jaws/teeth, if you wish.
Now, on to learning about how to avoid shark bites.
