Shell nature study

Hi! Future Ticia 2024 here, I’m updating this ancient science lesson post and making it more useful for people who want to do a shell nature study (note to self- create nature study landing page). This would be a great lesson if you have a beach vacation, or as it was for us is part of your swimming creatures science. I now return you to our shells nature study.

(there are affiliate links in here)

Past Ticia’s start to the shell nature study post

We’ve continued our chapter about mollusks and shell creatures and continued our explorations of our shells.

Putting together a shell collection

To answer a few questions I had about our shell collection:

•  These shells are from a combination of several trips to the beach (pre and post-kids).
• Some of these were bought, actually many of them.  Galveston is not the best location for finding shells. Future Ticia 2024 would like to say Galveston right after a tropical storm is a great time to get shells. Since we were there for one, that was rather fun.
• We have some ground rules for playing with them, mainly it has to stay at the table so we don’t lose/break them.

Supplies for this shell nature study

purchased shells, shells found on hikes, shell cross sections (or broken shells found on the beach), Apologia Swimming Creatures

Shell nature study procedure

This week we read about conches and the various different sea snails and the like.

First, we looked at these two shells I had found on the beach in Florida.  They’re both broken, and that’s why I picked them up.  They do a wonderful job of letting you see what a conch or whelk shell looks like on the inside.  The one on the left right lets you see that inside spiral and the one on the right left lets you see the spiral in relation to the rest of the shell (Future Ticia 2024 accidentally switched them when I updated the watermark).

After talking about that for a while we went through our box of shells and found the ones that best match these shells.

Then we looked at this cross-section of a moon snail shell (my best guess at the shell).  I bought this one when we went to Galveston knowing we’d get to this chapter and how awesome would it be to see what a shell looks like inside?  Just like before we found a matching shell that was whole, and compared the differences between these two types of shells.

They really enjoyed this and it actually became an hour and a half long session of looking at and exploring the shells, along with a few squabbles……….

For a preview of what’s coming, I send you to this post by Crafty classroom with her shells printable.

Actually, I’ve written that post now. I have two more posts in this mini-sea shell unit:

• Sea Shell Sorting
• Sea Shell Classification

How to make this shell nature study your own

Okay, you may not have been weird like me and decided you wanted to collect broken sea shells because they looked cool.

So, if that’s the case, how can you do this?

Well, I did link to a cross-section shell set you can purchase, but if you don’t want to purchase them, then see if your library has some of these books:

• DK Shells– pretty much any book in this style with lots of pictures
• Peterson’s First Guide to Shells

Next, start thinking what caused these holes?

Did the holes come from a predator, or are these holes from a rock, did it happen while its owner was still alive?

Try drawing it, and making observations about the shells.

More science ideas

Years ago, I hosted a science linkie, and I would share the posts people had linked up the week before, here are the posts still up (so many cool blogs gone):

• Mama of Many Blessings shared about the human nervous system and where she found some printables.

One, only one of the original posts is still up. Much sadness.

What Science Activities did you do this week?  It’s always fun to read them, even if I’m slow sometimes………