Ocean Theme Ideas and Links

I thought that I would share some of the activities that we completed this summer in my special education preschool classroom.  This summer the theme was Ocean.  The students had a blast learning about various ocean animals, and I also integrated basic skills such as letters, counting, shape recognition and color recognition into this theme.  Below is a compilation of activities, ideas and links to share with you.  Enjoy!

C is for Crab:

• We made paper plate crabs (see picture below) and reviewed the color red.

• We completed the Letter C worksheet from First-School.  Students used crayons to practice rainbow writing the upper and lower case letters, then they colored, cut and glued the objects that started with the letter c their papers.  You can find the worksheet here.
• We also read the Crab poem from the poem book “Commotion in the Ocean”

• We also later read Eric Carle’s book, “A House for Hermit Crab” and discussed how our crabs and the Hermit crab were the same (they both have claws, etc).

J is for Jellyfish:

• Students traced the letter J and talked about things that begin with the letter J.  We used this worksheet, that you can find here for the letter J.
• Students water colored paper plates and then we later added tissue paper strips to make the tentacles for our jellyfish.

S is for Seahorse:

• We watercolored sea horse clip-art that I found from The Mailbox’s Ocean Themed book.

This book retails for $7.00 from The Mailbox and is full of great ideas.

• Students colored seahorses and rainbow traced the letter s.  We used this worksheet from Lee Hansen.
• We also read Eric Carle’s book Mr. Seahorse. We talked about how daddy seahorses are special.

T is for Turtle:

• We painted paper plates green and had green construction paper shapes for students to glue to make the body parts.  We used the following shapes–large circle for the head, large triangle for the tail and 4 small rectangles for the legs.  After students painted their plates their were asked to identify shapes and glue them to their plates (i.e. “find the circle and glue this to the top of your plate”).  We also used a lot of positional words during this activity (i.e. on top of, bottom, side, etc).
• We completed this letter T tracing activity.
• We also completed a variety of activities that day related to the color green.

Here are some other great ocean theme pages to check out:

The Virtual Vine’s Ocean Theme

Pre-Kinder’s Ocean Unit

I’ll keep posting ideas as I load the pictures to my computer from summer school.  Thanks for looking!

~Barb