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I had heard of Night of the Moonjellies from all my Five In a Row friends, but it took me years to actually read it. I’m not sure why I waited so long! We recently incorporated this book into our geography study of the 50 States with my K-2nd co-op students. We read this while studying the Northeast region of the United States. For our class, we only did one of the activities, but I had researched many great moonjelly projects and activities that I thought I’d share them all here!

Night of the Moonjellies

Night of the Moonjellies book activities

Night of the Moonjellies by Mark Shasha book summary: Young Mark is on his way to help his Gram at their seaside food stand when something catches his eye on the beach. He scoops it up in seawater and brings it to Gram. At the end of a busy day, Gram shows Mark exactly what he found when taking him on a memorable boat ride.

I loved this book! It walked the reader through Mark’s day as he waited to find out what was his treasure. The illustrations are beautiful and the book is a nice reflection of the author’s childhood memory.

Since I was doing reading this book with a group of students, I wanted to have them have their own moonjelly momento. I had made sensory bottles in the past, and kids really enjoyed them, so I went ahead and made a class set of moonjelly bottles.

Moonjelly Sensory Bottles

Supplies: (afflink)

small water bottles
water
blue glitter
blue food coloring
water beads
glow in the dark bony beads
strong glue (I like E600)
duct tape

Night of the moonjellies sensory bottle

Directions:

Fill the bottle about half full of water. Carefully pour in 20 or so water beads. Add about 5-10 glow in the dark pony beads. Then add one drop of blue food coloring and some glitter. Shake. Pretty cool huh?

Once it is done, glue the lid with strong glue. Then wrap a piece of decorative duct tape around the lid.

This worked out perfectly for us! It was super hard to see the clear water beads but it made the children really have to observe their bottles in order to find them! It would be interesting to see how this turned out if you used green or blue water beads instead. The kids loved them! The following week they were still carrying them around!

When I was thinking about how to do this, I came across an awesome version of this bottle here but the thought of trying to make 11 realistic jellyfish was too overwhelming to me!

What are Moonjellies?

In the book the author refers to them as moonjellies but the animal he was describing were comb jellies ( ctenophores.) Here’s a short video on comb jellies: