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.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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