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.

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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