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.

I did a post earlier this year with activities and ideas for teaching the alphabet, but a lot or learning letters and recognizing them just has to do with seeing them and working with them a lot.

That means coloring, tracing, identifying things that start with different letters and more.

One way to reinforce the letters is through little activity books like these cute printable alphabet books from Life Over Cs.

These are available for free when you subscribe to her newsletter, and I’d say that’s well worth it if you have a little one (or a group of little ones!) working on the alphabet and letter recognition.

Each mini book includes a collection of things that start with that letter to color, color and read with words that start with the letter, tracing the letter, finding the letter in a grid and other coloring pages with objects that start with that letter.

These little books are super useful reinforcing the different letters and giving kids different activities related to the letters.

If you do a letter of the day or letter of the week you can use a new book for each one, and then keep the copies in your reading center or in a basket where kids can look at them again.

And of course you can add in all the other letter activities you like, go on a scavenger hunt for items that start with that letter, read alphabet books, practice writing letters in rice or with pompoms or playdough or whatever sensory activities you like.

You can grab the free printables when you enter you email address at Life Over Cs, and check out her other great alphabet resources and activities while you are over there.

Do you have favorite activities for teaching letters to kids? I’d love to hear about them!

[Photo: Life Over Cs]

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