Kid Wednesday Summer: Ocean

I decided that since I did all the letters through the year that during the summer we would spend a week or two and work on different subjects.  We picked Oceans for this week and had a blast learning about the different things about the ocean the first week.  Then, we continued to learn about the animals in the ocean through our books and doing some learning activities during our second week.

Here are some of the books that we read to start learning about oceans.  My son really liked the book Gone Fishing because the shapes of the animals that were numbers.  He read most of the Sponges are Skeletons book to us during his reading time.  I went into the section in the library and picked out whatever they had that was age appropriate and this is what I got.  I am sure you can work with whatever you find at your library too.

Then, we got out the globe and pointed at all of the oceans.  This globe labels them North Atlantic Ocean and South Atlantic Ocean so it opened up the conversation of North, South, East West.  My son thought that was interesting so I am sure we are going to do something else with maps soon.

We decided to create an ocean book.  I found this great book on Teachers Pay Teachers (you need an account but it is free to download) and decided it was the beginning of our book.  My son had such a blast that he wanted to write all the pages in one day which is more then I was thinking was going to happen.  He did the fish page first and wrote in all the words and told me that he was done.  I asked him if he was going to draw the picture of the fish in the box.  It was like a light bulb went off because he started coloring with his colored pencils and he was working hard.

 I was only planning on doing one sheet that morning but my son had other ideas and said what do I get to draw next.  This might not be exciting for other parents but my kid was never happy to color and always did a little and asked us to finish because his hand hurt.  I was so excited so next we did the shark.  He was very serious about his work and even erased the words when he wasn't happy with how they were on the line.

He did the page about the turtle next.

Lastly, there was one where you got to pick which animal you were going to be.  My son decided on the seahorse which is my favorite ocean animal.  He was tired after doing three sheets and since I was only planning on one, I figured it was okay to help on the last one since he asked.  I drew the outline in the pencil he asked me to and filled in the words that he told me.  He colored the huge picture all by himself.

Later, he glued the cover on construction paper so that we could make it into a book.  He was so eager to staple the book but I told him that we needed to put all of our work in so he had to wait.  It might have been the hardest thing that he did all week.

During the rest of the week, we did some other activities with coloring and counting. If you would like to do these pages, download them here.  The first one my son did all by himself and he picked the colors and colored everything and counted at the bottom of the page. (download here)

The next one I left out for his morning work and colored the pictures at the bottom.  He did a much better job staying within the lines and I added a little bit more complicated option with the two toned green turtle.

The next day, I clipped this to his clipboard and he did it all by himself and he started writing fractions to keep track of how many he did.  I was amazed but it lead into one of our other activities with fractions so I was excited.

 The fractions were easy for him.  He decided that he should put a circle around the number and color in each number as he finished them.  It is close to his list obsession but it turned out looking pretty. (download here)

We did a Ocean Word Search.  These are sometimes a little challenging because he finds two words and then he decides that it is hard and he wants help.  It takes a lot of patience to do word searches but I am sticking with it.  I think that if he does them enough that he will learn to have the patience for them.  Hopefully this works!! (download here)

We did the thumbprint pictures which I put off until the end because I thought it was going to be messy which meant that I couldn't leave it to do in the morning with his father.  I had a wet towel next to him and he wiped off the finger after each time (with a little reminding) and it wasn't that messy.  There were two and it was really fun but I do wish there was one really long fish because it would have been fun! (download here)

We did the Where Do We Live? sheet.  I was hoping that my son would color the areas and cut and paste the different animals in their habitat but he had had enough coloring so we saved this to color later.  He picked green paper and glued it on for the back cover of our Ocean book. (download here)

I found this cute make at home book about Sharks after we went through most of the other information in the first week.  I thought we would learn about a few specific animals since we covered the general information about the ocean the first week.  There was a new book at the library that we read about Stingrays that is called Stingrays (Nature's Children) by Jennifer Zeiger.  It was really interesting with great pictures showing the different parts of the stingray body.

In the past, we have done some other crafts that would fall into the same category so I didn't want to do them again but they would still be fun for you and your kids to do.  This is the Mister Seashore from the front cover of the Eric Carle book which my son made with watercolors to look like his picture.  A great book and a great craft.

We also made an jellyfish out of half of a paper plate and some curling ribbon.

There were other crafts made with paper plates like this cute whale.

And some Octopus crafts with toilet paper tubes that were spray painted white (but you can pick any color you have around the house).

My son also got on the pbskids.org website and found a Cat In the Hat game about the ocean called Swirly Whirly Pearl Hunt.  He had a blast playing and afterwards, made up different and creative animals which he printed out.  He colored them in the next day and we put them in our ocean book.  Always great to integrate technology and creativity into learning.  The best part is that he has greatly increased his hand eye coordination by being able to use the computer too!!  I went on and made a few animals myself and it was fun and easy.

There are so many great ways to learn about the ocean and we are going to to try to take a family trip to the ocean and have some more fun with it later in the summer.  I think that we are probably going to be bringing our ocean book with us!!  What did you do to learn about the ocean creatures??