Ocean Preschool Theme

Around the end of June, I love to start our ocean unit! It's one where we go the most in depth and have the most fun, even in landlocked Kansas.

Beans has really enjoyed learning about ocean animals this month and has learned and absorbed so much more than I expected. My plan was to finish our ocean theme by taking a family trip to the aquarium but unplanned expenses and events kept getting in our way. Maybe next year!

 So, here are some of the things we like to do for our ocean theme.

So I'm pretty proud of this display lol. It took much longer than I expected but I love how it turned out. That ocean book on the left was one of Beans's favorites and the Usborne Shark book was amazing. In the basket we have our Safari Toob sea animals and matching cards.

Feed the shark fishies! I love to make games like this. It's just an empty tissue box covered in paper and I added the shark details. Then cut out all the fish and wrote letters on them. It's a really fun way to work on letter recognition.

Ocean sensory bottles. She loves sensory bottles and carries them around like this, calling them her babies. I have no idea why; she has actual babies.

A wonderful ocean matching game I happened upon at Barnes and Noble. It was a huge hit. And yes she sure is wearing an Archer shirt, because we had just been painting. And Archer is amazing (no she's never seen it....)

Ocean slime!

Our DIY light table: A long clear tote, string lights and flashlights, and as many blue/ocean-ish things as we could find. Here we're using her blue magnetic tiles, glass gems and blue counters from dollar tree, and her see animals.

Swimming with mermaids! This was so simple to set up, just a blue sheet for the water and all her stuffed sea animals and mermaids. The backdrop was also from dollar tree. This kept her occupied for quite a while and turned into a fun mermaid tea party!

Magical mermaid potions, one of our favorite methods of sensory/science play. To set this up I used blue aquarium rocks, mermaids, empty jars filled with baking soda and colored vinegar, large sea shells as scoops, whisks, scoops, blue glass gems and sea glass (dollar tree again!) and epsom salt dyed with food coloring for a glitter effect. The colors and the chemical reaction makes this such a magical, fun activity.

Ocean counting with glass gems again.

Ocean art. From left to right: We used water color for the blue, then tore it into long strips. Then used a sponge to make clouds and glued on the paper strips. 

I drew wavey lines with oil pastels and Beans water colored over it and we sprinkled salt on top.

Water color with salt again.

Finger painting in Ocean colors.

Here is our homemade play doh and an attempt at some sort of sand dough that didn't really turn out. BUT we still had a lot of fun with it!

Baby shark practicing her cutting skills with paint samples from the hardware store. She has every princess costume but almost always asks for her baby shark halloween costume, of course.

Showing off her jelly fish and octopus! For the octopus she just painted however she wanted and then I cut out the head shape and we added eyes. Then she used the same paint colors to paint bubble wrap. When that dried, I cut it into strips and attached it. For the jelly fish, she colored a coffee filter with markers and then sprayed it with water to get the cool tie dye effect. I folded it in half, we repeated the bubble wrap painting, and attached them! They turned out so cute and she really loved popping bubble wrap lol.

Here are just a few of our favorite ocean themed books we read, out of the 10000 I have in my ocean tote (I always thought I wasn't a hoarder....turns out I am, of kids books):

This one is definitely out of her age group, but I had to have it because it was SO cool. We mostly just looked at it together and used it as a talking point about different countries and cultures. 

We love sticker activity books and this one was great! We even brought it to the vet when we had to wait and wait.

Also during this time, we watched A LOT of Finding Dory and Beans developed an obsession with octopuses lol. We also watched a few ocean documentaries on Disney+ and on youtube.

Do you do an ocean theme with your kids? Let me know what you think or any other ideas!
Thankss for reading!

-Danielle M