First time for everything!

  Hey readers! Kiauna here..

So, for the first time ever, I led a lesson all by myself today! When I left my house this morning, to my disbelief, it was pouring outside. I'm usually outdoors fishing with kids so as you can imagine I was not too excited about my day. That changed of course once I arrived at Courageous Sailing. 

JB taking a guess at what animal she got

Once at Courageous, my Senior Marine Educator, Sarah, informed me that I would be leading my own activity for the kids. I'm not going to lie, at first I was kind of nervous. I had never led an activity for the kids and I wasn't sure I'd be any good at it. "What if the kids all hate me after this?", I thought to myself. It can be sort of overwhelming to be left in charge of something, believe it or not.

Warm and indoors, I discussed sea animals with the group of kids. We put our favorite sea animal into different categories (Mammals, Invertebrates, Fish, and Other). Once someone shared what their favorite was, we had to decipher which category it fell into. The kids were so smart. They knew most of the 5 main traits of a mammal. In case one isn't familiar with these traits, they are the following: they give live birth, have fur/hair, breathe air, warm-blooded, their babies feed on their milk. The milk comes from a mammal's mammary glands. Hence, the name of the class, mammals. There's a fun fact for ya!

Talking about/grouping our favorite marine animals

After an interesting learning experience, it was only right that we did something fun with the new knowledge. I decided to play a game with the kids that would allow us to explore the new things we'd learned. Using the animals we had talked about (and a few that we hadn't) I wrote the name of an animal on a post-it note the kids took turns getting one stuck to their forehead..sounds silly, I know! The person with a post-it in their forehead did not know what was written on that post-it. They had to ask everyone else a few questions to try to figure out what the post-it said. One catch; they had to be yes or no questions only! For example: "Do I have a blowhole?" If the group answered yes I would then know that whatever was on my forehead was definitely a mammal. Makes sense, right? It's not as easy as it sounds, trust me! Rainy day aside, we still had a lot of fun. We even got a couple of Courageous Sailing's staff to join in! Turns out, I was nervous for nothing because everything went smoothly and I actually had a great time being a leader!

We had Kayla stumped 

Take chances, be a leader, and do great things,
Kiauna Peete (Kiki)