Ocean Month, Part One

Fact: if you want a preschool theme with hundreds upon hundreds of ideas, oceans are the way to go. Holy cow there's a lot of stuff. 

Printables: Royal Baloo and 3 Dinosaurs teamed up to do a week-long theme (which could easily be way MORE than a week, if you're as casual about completing activities as I am). They have activities for tot through first grade. Gift of Curiosity also has a ton of ideas and printables (free with e-mail subscription). I ended up with so many worksheet packs saved that I spent an hour sorting through, printing the ones I liked, and making folders for Levi and Owen to work on throughout the month. It worked well; one bored morning, I pulled out the folders, they did as many pages as they wanted, and I tucked them away for the next time. 

Owen's first dot-to-dot.

Word search, scrambled words.

Gluing on the beginning consonant.

Roll and graph ocean creatures.

Random shot of growing baby in big boy high chair. :D

Scissors practice. You can also see the paper ocean-creature die we used for the graph.

Scissors practice: straight lines. 

Instead of getting Levi a big gift for his fifth birthday, my parents opted to come down and take him (and Owen) on a special outing. Levi picked the aquarium -- how fitting for our ocean month!

Remember our St. Patrick's Day shaving-cream rainbow sensory tub? I recreated it with whales, starfish, and shaving cream dyed blue to make an ocean! The whales were a gift to Owen from my husband's mom after a trip to Florida; the starfish were a gift from a church member to my husband at his ordination service. (I'm not sure why. I think they're supposed to be decorative. But I don't have any beach-y bathrooms or anything like that, so they got re-purposed for preschool.)

The bottom of the tub.

Covered in shaving cream (dyed light blue with liquid watercolors).

Painting the walls (after the whales were all found).

Not willing to go in the tub, but happy to play in the sink.

Our main books for the month are Magic School Bus on the Ocean Floor and the National Geographic Little Kids' First Big Book of the Ocean (a gift to the boys from Isaac's aunt). Next post, I'll tell you about our story books and literature-based crafts, along with a rather traumatic attempt at playing a fishing game with all three boys.