Activities for Learning about the Ocean

Learning about the ocean is always fun, but it’s a nice thing to do in the summer, especially if you have any vacations to the beach planned. But even if you don’t, these ocean animal activities are lots of fun for kids of all ages.

These fact sheets about ocean animals from 3 Boys and a Dog are a great way to learn about animals including crabs, clown fish, dolphins, jellyfish, octopus, orca, sea turtles and starfish.

Little kids will enjoy the dot marker printable pages from The Artisan Life. There are seven options including an octopus, dolphin, lobster and whale. Turner Tots has a week long ocean unit study for preschool including books, sensory bin ideas and lots of cute printable activities you can buy.

This shell alphabet printable from NurtureStore would be fun to print as a matching game, or laminate the letters and use them to practice spelling basic words, ocean or otherwise.

Pull out your pattern blocks to make the ocean animal designs from Life Over Cs. There’s a fish, octopus, whale, stingray and shark for kids to build. And practice cutting with simple ocean life shapes from Homeschool Share.

Learn about the layers of the ocean and assemble your own diagram of the ocean layers with the printables from Teach Me Mommy. Simple Everyday Mom also has a good ocean zones activity using colored water and little ocean animal toys.

If you’re willing to spend a little, this printable ocean diorama from 24 Hour Printables is so pretty and would be lots of fun to color and assemble.

Play ocean bingo with the printables from A Dab of Glue Will Do. You can even use Goldfish crackers as your markers. (I would totally lose if I did this because I would eat them all before the game was over.)Or color, count and graph the sea creatures with this printable from Sarah Chesworth.

Need more resources for learning about the ocean with kids? Check out this marine biology unit study and this huge collection of beach and ocean themed printables, perfect for using in the car on the way to the beach or in the home or classroom.

Several countries have a day set aside to honor and recognize their inventors, but Nov. 9 is a special one that’s known as Tag der Erfinder in German. It’s celebrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and it falls on Nov. 9 because that’s the birthday of Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr is widely known as an actress but there’s a lot more to her story. You can get a little of it geared to little kids in the Little People, Big Dreams book Hedy Lamarr (32 pages, hardcover, published 2023 by Frances Lincoln Childrens Books, suggested retail price $15.99).

The book explores her birth in Austria and how she spent time when she was young coming up with inventions. She became an actress, married an arms dealer, made her escape to America and became an actress again.

But she also helped develop a frequency-hopping signal device for airplanes that was used by the Americans and their allies during World War II. That technology became the basis for wireless technology such as wifi and GPS.

While Inventor’s Day is a great time to learn about Hedy Lamarr, you can take this opportunity to check out books and do little studies on lots of different inventors. If there’s an inventor or an invention your child is particularly interested in, that’s a great place to start. It’s fun to think about all the things we use every day that didn’t always exist; someone had to invent them!

For a start here at Craft Gossip you can learn more about Garrett Morgan, who invented traffic lights; Maria Oroso, who developed a clay oven that could cook food without electricity; and more female inventors and scientists.

And for more general inventors’ fun, check out this inventors word search from Fun Findery (and another from Let’s Do Puzzles) or take a quiz on inventors and their inventions from Flanders Family Home Life.

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