Jen, Bryce and reluctant Judy meet the basking shark.

In a rare event last week, a giant basking shark was spotted several miles inland on the Big Island of Hawaii. Upon closer inspection, onlookers found this 23’ specimen to be made of fabric and air and accompanying screenings of our newest film, The Shark Riddle.

We’d like to thank the Waimea Ocean Film Festival and The Save Our Seas Foundation for making it possible for us to share our shark presentation with the people of Hawaii. Through a combination of film, breakfast talks, Q&As, receptions, art exhibits and activities, the festival is designed to inspire, educate and engage participants in a celebration of the ocean and island culture, and an increased awareness of the same. Throughout the week, we shared The Shark Riddle at three public screenings, as well as a school presentation for students at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy. The students were so great to meet – in fact, two kindergarten students (with help from their Principal) presented us with beautiful leis when we arrived. After our program, we loved talking with the students, and we especially loved that there was a ukelele music class practicing while we were packing up our gear. Their Principal later said “We found both Laura and Rob to be highly engaging, fun, animated and well spoken presenters for our kindergarteners through fifth graders. It is no small feat to keep such a range of learners at rapt attention for almost an hour and they did exactly that. The smiles on the children’s faces as they left with their packet of fun educational activities AND their fabulous temporary tattoos were priceless.”

Rob & Laura with HPA students, all holding "shark fins" on their heads

We participated in the festival as part of our “Shark Days” grant from the Save Our Seas Foundation. The grant funded this custom inflatable shark, which we take with us as a way for people feel what it’s like to stand next to a true giant of the ocean, and to open minds to the true diversity of sharks.  The basking shark is the second largest fish in the ocean, growing to 33 feet, and is completely harmless to humans as it only eats plankton.

People investigate the basking shark after our interactive presentation

Sisbro at the Kahilu Theater

And as an added bonus, the Waimea Ocean Film Festival awarded us with the Overall Best Creative Work!

Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, Photo by Tom Mangelsen

If you see us twirling with arms wide atop the Grand Teton Mountains (or at least twirling over-enthusiastically in our office chairs), it is because The Shark Riddle is a finalist at the 2011 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival. We are finalists for Best Children’s Program, up against some steep competition – My Pantanal, by Panthera, and Turtle Vision, from nWave Pictures Distribution. But alas, we are thrilled to be part of the competition! Robert and I are preparing for our journey to the festival at the Jackson Lake Lodge, in the middle of the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

We are taking daily baths in moose repellant, running relay races to see who can lace his/her hiking shoes more quickly, practicing our firm yet friendly handshakes for all that networking and, of course, staring at movies without blinking for 30 minutes at a time – so we won’t miss any moment of the wonderful films in this year’s festival.

Internationally renowned as the largest and most prestigious competition of the nature genre, this year’s Festival competition included 510 films from more than 30 countries entering — a record number of submissions competing for 22 special category awards. More than eighty judges from North America, Europe, Asia and Africa participated in the preliminary selections.

The Riddle Solvers: The Shark Riddle Poster

In the meantime, do you want to see what has made The Shark Riddle one of the three best nature-based children’s programs of the year? Enjoy a clip of The Great White Shark Song by clicking here. Or enjoy a strange but alluring look at shark teeth (and shark dentists) by clicking here. Overall the film is designed to help children and their families learn two things: 1)Sharks are diverse and 2)Sharks are important for a healthy ocean. It all begins with the discovery of a magic journal filled with sketches of shark teeth, and it continues with a quest to find a tooth from the biggest fish in the ocean. Robert and I purposely wrote a script, with our colleague Dave Cain, that would give people a truly new look at sharks. For example – when we wrote music, we purposely decided to do the exact opposite of the Jaws theme – by writing a shark lullaby. And instead of learning about sharks from people in the water, we used the viewpoint of a remora fish – the fish that suction cups its head to the sides of sharks for a free ride. I really think the movie is one of the most marvelous, musical and magical films about sharks ever made for children, with incredibly vivid, high definition footage of over 20 shark species.

The 2011 award winners will be selected by a distinguished panel in Jackson Hole preceding the five-day industry conference held in Grand Teton Park at the Jackson Lake Lodge October 3-7, and will be announced at a Gala celebration on Thursday, October 6th. We will let you know what happens. In the meantime, I’m starting to get dizzy from all this excited twirling in my chair. Plus it makes it hard to type, since I can only type as I swing around past the keyboard in my chair twirling frenzy.

Get ready for a quirky, wonderful look at the “less famous” sharks of the world, in a video made by the students in our Shark Week class at Portland Saturday Academy, Summer 2011. We spent the entire week studying sharks, as well as looking at how the media portrays sharks in different films. We watched our own children’s film about sharks called The Shark Riddle, as well as the short clips from the Save Our Seas Foundation called Rethink the Shark, and a film from Living Ocean Productions called Requiem. We did lots of activities from The Shark Packet of educational materials that I designed – from shark hats to shark scientific inquiry to shark bingo.

Then the students needed to come up with their own “public service announcement” about sharks. The “less famous” shark idea was suggested by a student who was reading the Collins Field Guide to Sharks of the World. Another student brought a shark costume from home, and the school already had a boat in its garden. The students spent a day making props – they were each responsible for drawing three different “lesser-known” sharks. The class divided other prop building needs, from making boat oars to the shark mural to the shark fins (as featured in Landshark Lawn Ornaments in The Shark Packet).

When we filmed this short little masterpiece, the students shared jobs on the film crew. We definitely had some challenges, since the boat was in the middle of a playground, with ambient kid sounds all around us. We had to wait for preschool classes to run by, a lacrosse practice to slow down, a basketball camp to take a break from bouncing balls . . . but eventually we were able to record a few good lines.

I am so, so very proud of all the students in our class this week! Their enthusiasm about sharks is certainly hard to ignore. I wholeheartedly agree that SHARKS ARE AWESOME.

Middle school students color great white shark sheet

What things kill more people per year than shark attacks? During our “Shark Science Week: A Global Perspective” class this week at Portland Saturday Academy, a group of smart middle school students were challenged with creating a shark-themed mural on a bed sheet – with information they thought was important to share with other people. They decided to create a tableau of “Things more deadly than sharks.”

Middle school students color "Things more deadly than sharks"

Based on their research, here are some of the items they featured:

hot dogs

Bathtub and strange toilet with fangs

bathtubs

coconuts

vending machines

tornadoes

Angry lightning

lightning

bicycles

icicles

texting (while driving)

stairs (or falling down them)

kites

On average, less than 10 people (and usually only around 5) are killed by sharks. You can look at statistics at the International Shark Attack file. In our movie The Shark Riddle, we didn’t delve into death statistics, since our movie is for elementary school students and younger. We focused on helping them understand that sharks are diverse and important for the ocean. We showed The Shark Riddle to middle school students, who really loved it (especially the parts where my brother accidentally sat on shark teeth sticking out of rocks) – and we used it as a springboard for more global issues and statistics. We also mapped shark migrations based on scientific satellite tracking, and they marveled at how a great white shark could travel all the way from South Africa to Australia in a matter of three months. Or how a basking shark could travel all the way from the coast of Ireland to the coast of Newfoundland. Or how a mako shark could travel from the California coast to Hawaii and back. These sharks need a global conservation approach, since we all share one big ocean – and protecting sharks on one continent will only do so much if a shark swims to an entirely other continent.

Landshark Lawn Ornaments with Shark Fact Sign

Looking for a way to shark attack your school yard, your neighbor’s garden or your own flower bed? Make these shark fins, place them near amazing shark facts, and you have a funny and educational way to share your passion for sharks! This is also a great way to recycle old cardboard. And the fins look hilarious swimming through a garden. This activity is from The Shark Packet, a curriculum guide designed to accompany the children’s program The Shark Riddle. You may download the whole activity and shark fin templates for free by clicking here. Just look for page 7 in the packet.

Hammerhead Shark Fins in a Hedge

Educational Standards
Comparing and contrasting characteristics of a group of animals.
Understanding that animals have adaptations to survive in an environment.
Using observations to ask questions and study the world.
Using communication skills to share important information with others.

Materials Needed
Pieces of cardboard (used cereal boxes, old packaging boxes, etc.) or posterboard, paintbrush, washable paint (in shark colors like black, brown, gray and blue), scissors or utility knife, pencil, wooden dowels (2 to 4 feet long), duct tape

Background on Dorsal Fins
When people think of sharks, they often imagine a shark’s dorsal fin suddenly slicing through the water, revealing the tip of a powerful predator lurking just below the surface.

In reality, the majority of shark species do not swim with their dorsal fins above the surface. Unlike whales, who must surface to breathe and therefore often end up with their dorsal fins above the water, sharks do not need to surface to breathe. Shark fins do break the surface when they feed on bait that people put in the water.  Shark fins also break the surface when sharks enter shallow water, to breed or give birth, such as the lemon shark pupping grounds in the mangrove forests of Florida. But most of the time, as described by the Biology of Sharks and Rays Web site, sharks usually swim far enough below the surface that we don’t see the fins.

When dorsal fins do break the surface, ­scientists can use the fin shape to identify individual sharks. For great white sharks,
the shape of the dorsal fin is as unique as human fingerprints are for identification. Scientists can see slight differences in the edges of the fins. They use these differences to recognize individual sharks and study the behaviors of different sharks in the water.

Shark fins come in many shapes and sizes. The great hammerhead shark’s fin is taller and pointier than some other species. The great white shark has a “typical” triangular fin shape, one that we have seen many times in movies. The horn shark is a small shark with a spine on its dorsal fins, which helps protect it from predators that try to bite it. Other sharks have shorter and wider dorsal fins. Some fins are basically one color. Some have spots or stripes.  The oceanic whitetip shark has a white tip on its dorsal fins. The blacktip reef shark has a black tip on its dorsal fins.

Why do sharks have fins anyway?  Sharks are fish, which means they have fins like fish.  Dorsal fins are the fins on the back (top) of the fish, used for stabilizing the fish in the water. A dorsal fin is like a keel of a sailboat, which helps it go straight. The dorsal fin works with the pectoral fins, which are like the wings of an airplane, to keep fish from rolling over. Fish also have a tail (or caudal) fin that provides speed and power. The tail fin of the thresher shark is actually used to stun prey.

The main dorsal fin is made mostly of cartilage and dermal collagen fibers, with little muscle tissue. Though it appears rigid, the dorsal fin can bend and warp to help with swimming.

Pre-Activity Discussion Questions
Imagine you are a marine biologist, who is seeing a shark fin for the first time. Make a list of words that come to mind when you think
of shark fins. Fear? Power? And what do shark fins look like? A sailboat’s sail? An ­airplane’s tail?

Take time to research sharks or watch The Shark Riddle, and make sketches of different kinds of fins. Which fins help keep a fish from rolling over?  The dorsal fin and pectoral fins help fish stay upright. Which fins give sharks their power and speed? The tail (or caudal) fin.

Compare the shape of a shark to the shape of an airplane. Compare the shape of a shark to the shape of a sailboat. Why are some
parts similar?

Procedure
Note: It is better for an adult to cut the shape out of cardboard for safety reasons. Then ­children can paint and decorate the fins.

1.     Choose the shape of a shark’s dorsal fin to use as your guide. You may use the hammerhead or great white fin templates provided in The Shark Packet, which you can trace, or you can use as a guide to draw a bigger version, depending on the size of your cardboard.

Cutting out the shark fin, very, very carefully

2.     Draw the shape of the shark’s fin on your cardboard sheet.
3.     Using scissors or a utility knife, carefully cut out the shape of the fin.

Painting the cardboard shark fin with the finesse of person who doesn't paint very much

4.     Paint one side of the fin and let the paint dry.

Taping a dowel to the back of your glorious and hilarious landshark fin

5.     After the paint dries, firmly tape a wooden dowel with duct tape to the back side of the fin.
6.     Choose an interesting shark fact to feature with your fin.  You can make another sign that features this fact, or you may even write the fact on the painted fin. You can find an entire list of amazing shark facts in The Shark Packet, available for download.

Shark fins peek above a well-trimmed hedge. Do you think neighbors will notice when they walk by?

7.     Choose an interesting place outside and stick the wooden dowel in the dirt, with the fin showing as if it were swimming through some bushes, flowers, etc. If several people make fins, it looks like an entire school of sharks are swimming through someone’s garden! Place your signs with shark facts near the fins, and you’ll have a powerful, attention-getting tool to help people learn about sharks!
Note: Since these are made of cardboard, they can be damaged by water, like rain. If you want to make these fins last longer outside, try re-using and cutting old plastic or foam.

Laura Sams wears a great white shark hat and ponders deep thoughts about peanut butter on toast

Robert Sams wears a hammerhead shark hat with much pride in his coloring skills

Have you always wanted to wear a shark on your head? Me too. Here is your chance to make a great white shark or hammerhead shark hat. It is an activity from The Shark Packet of educational activities based on the children’s film The Shark Riddle. You can download the shark hat templates for free by clicking here. Just look for the picture of The Shark Packet, click on it and download the pdf. You’ll find Shark Hats on page 4.

Materials
Copies of the great white and hammerhead templates, 9”x 13” construction paper, tape, stapler with staples, crayons or markers

Procedure
1. Cut construction paper into strips about 3 inches (7.6 cm) wide. Two strips will be used in each hat.
2. Make copies of the great white shark or hammerhead template, depending on which shark hat you wish to make.
3. Color the shark head.
4. Cut the shark head shape out of the paper.

Cutting out the Colored Shark for Your Magnificent Hat of Champions

5. To make the construction paper hat ring, tape or staple two ends of the construction paper strips together, so you have one long strip. Wrap that strip around the person’s head who will be wearing the hat, to determine appropriate size. Tape or staple the remaining ends together, so that the ring will fit snugly (though not too snugly) around the person’s head. If you are using staples, be careful that the rough parts of the staples are not on the inside of the ring, because they may scrape the skin of the person wearing the hat.

6. Tape the  construction paper ring to the back side of the shark head. As a tip, try laying the shark head down flat, with the blank side up, and tape the construction paper ring to the shark that way. Be sure to make the shark head straight, so that it will face upright on the person’s head. Also, the hammerhead shark neck can be a bit flimsy, so it is sturdier to tape the ring higher on the hammerhead’s head.
7. Wear the hat proudly!

Blacktip Reef Shark on Bed Sheet

When you can’t fall asleep at night, do you count sharks? With over 450 kinds of sharks (the exact number is debated – but there are definitely a lot), there are really a lot of choices to help you fall lazily into a dreamy, peaceful sleep. From the small epaulette shark, which lives in the shallows, walks on its fins and sucks up worms . . . to the biggest fish in the ocean, the whale shark. The whale shark is huge, but it’s a peaceful animal that cruises around filtering the water for zooplankton.

This picture shows a twin-bed sheet, decorated with a life-size version of a black-tip reef shark (about 5.5 feet long). The shark was colored with fabric markers by 4th and 5th graders at the Portland Saturday Academy Shark Science class.

Blacktip Reef Shark Face

I taught the class for a week, and we delved into the science of these ancient and powerful predators – from investigating shark teeth to touching shark skin to watching The Shark Riddle, our latest children’s film. After a week of absorbing the great and strange and marvelous world of sharks, the students were charged with creating an outreach piece about sharks. What did they want to say about sharks? What did they think kids their age should know about sharks? The students collaborated to create this mural, and then they wrote facts about sharks on the bottom. Here are some of the highlighted facts:

Shark Facts from Students

Over 100 million sharks were killed by people last year.

On average, less than 10 people are killed by sharks each year.

Sharks can lose up to 30,o00 teeth in a lifetime!

We should protect sharks not kill them.

Sharks have 5 to 7 gill slits on the sides of their heads.

Shark skeletons are made of cartilage.

Sharks are fish.

Sharks have been around since before dinosaurs.

The whale shark, the biggest fish in the ocean has very tiny teeth.

The basking shark is the second biggest shark in the ocean.

Sharks do not kill people on purpose.

Great white sharks eat sea lions because they love the taste of blubber.

There are over 400 different kinds of sharks.

Shark Facts from Students in Shark Science Class

Robert and I will share this mural with other students, as we travel around the country showing The Shark Riddle at schools and museums. If you want to make your own shark mural, get an old sheet. Trace the shape of a shark on it, and start coloring with fabric markers. It’s lots of fun! And if I may say so, I would have liked to have a shark sheet on my bed as a kid.

It is with great joy that we present The Great White Shark Tribute Song from our new project The Shark Riddle! If you were going to create a song about the great white shark’s role in the ecosystem, about how it is needed for a healthy food chain, who better to sing the song than . . . . a sea lion? Why not have a marine mammal sing about its own role in the food chain? Get ready for a song that I believe is one of our best . . . and I hope you find yourself cheering for the great white shark! The high definition underwater shark footage was filmed by the talented cameramen from the Save Our Seas Foundation. Much of the sea lion footage was filmed by Robert along the Oregon coast. And we used some additional shots from Tom Campbell.

Robert is performing the voice of the lead sea lion, but we worked with Portland musicians to bring the rest of the song to life. To add some unique percussion, we were inspired by “the food chain” and recorded the sound of a link of chain falling into our hands. We also used a slinky to add some fun rhythm . . . which was one of the crowning achievements of our audio engineer, who had secretly always left a slinky near his recording studio just in case, for one glorious moment when the stars aligned, he could finally use a slinky appropriately in a song. To create the whole group of sea lions singing “great white shark” we gathered a group of friends in the recording studio – mostly men, but a few women too, so we could add a bit of harmony to the shark chorus. We also stomped on planks to give an authentic, seaworthy beat.

A lot of people ask us how we write music. Robert and I spent months thinking about this song – what style should it be? Would it be catchy enough that people could sing it after hearing the song? How do you write a good tribute to the great white shark, deviating from the usual soundtrack of suspenseful bass tones? How do we surprise viewers and give them something truly unexpected? Then while Robert was driving across Montana on his way to the International Wildlife Film Festival, he thought of a bass line and a melody. He called me on on the phone and sang it briefly, and I knew . . . that was it! We batted around lots of lyric ideas. I wrote down a few phrases that were fun, like “sharks are blubber lovers.” Rob came up with the line about “living out here where the breeze is breezy, the water is wet and the fishin’ is easy.” We even debated on the line about octopii, checking to make sure that was a correct way to pluralize the word “octopus” (turns out you can use octopuses, octopii or octopodes). We really wanted to have an octopus in the song, because Robert filmed a giant pacific octopus in Hood Canal, Washington, in a very cold, but very rewarding dive.

Later, when we were pilot testing this section from The Shark Riddle, it was fun to watch kids’ reactions. We were trying to convey the food chain without being too gruesome, and the kids who have watched it so far have really loved it. Hopefully the song will be a good springboard for mapping a food web or a food chain, from the plants to the fish to the sea lions to the great white shark. I even developed a worksheet to accompany the song in our educational Shark Packet that will be available soon.

In any case, I truly hope you enjoy this song. — Laura Sams

Pirate clad staff of Bertha Holt Elementary during our author visit

Pirate clad students of Bertha Holt Elementary during our author visit

]]> http://blog.sisbrostudios.com/pirate-school/feed/ 0 http://blog.sisbrostudios.com/posters-about-reading/ http://blog.sisbrostudios.com/posters-about-reading/#comments Sat, 06 Mar 2010 06:25:30 +0000 laura http://blog.sisbrostudios.com/?p=337

A winning poster from Maire Elementary's poster contest to encourage reading

Ahoy all ye book lovers! We recently visited Lewis Maire Elementary in Michigan, who had a poster contest to raise awareness about reading. Every year, the school celebrates March is reading month by inviting an author to visit, and then the students read throughout the month (with pledges) to raise money toward the March of Dimes. Part of this year’s festivities included a challenge to create posters that encouraged reading, based on our children’s book A Pirate’s Quest and movie The Riddle in a Bottle. Why not use pirates and ocean creatures to encourage reading? Before each assembly, we were lucky enough to judge the posters and choose a few winners. I must say that I was very impressed – lots of great ocean creatures, like the octopus holding books in his tentacles. I particularly liked the student who created “book-head” sharks, which look like hammerhead sharks, but have books for heads.  There were also many animated pirates hooked on books, with reading treasure, sailing to reading destinations . . . Here are a few of the students’ pirate and ocean reading masterpieces.

Laura and Robert Sams pose with reading-themed poster winners after the afternoon author assembly

A Book is a Treasure Poster

"Book Head" Sharks Encourage Reading

Grab a Good Book

Pirate Reading Poster called Read a Whale of a Tail

Rrrrrrrrread it Poster

A Pirate-themed Poster: Read a Book It's Better Than Treasure!

We didn’t get pictures of all the posters, but I think you can see there were some great, creative ideas, which were proudly displayed in the school’s halls after our assembly. Congratulations to all ye poster-making scalliwags!