Beach & Ocean Activity Plans

Download the beach & ocean week planning guide for easy to prep and play learning ideas to use at home or in your preschool classroom!

DAY 1

Catch a Fish: Print the fish page or create your own. Write a letter of the alphabet on each fish. Hang the fish up on the wall with tape. Spread the fish out, so that they cover the entire room. Say a letter. Have your preschooler look for that letter on the fish. When the letter is found, your preschooler can jump up and catch (hit or tap) the fish! The game can also be played the other way. Your preschooler can catch a fish and say the letter when tapping it.

Sandy Shapes: Pour play sand (you can also use salt if needed) into a tray. Cover the bottom, but don’t over fill the tray. Practice drawing different shapes in the sand with your finger or a popsicle stick. To make it a little easier, especially if shape recognition hasn’t been mastered, go ahead and draw shapes on a piece of paper for your preschooler to copy into the sand.

DAY 2

Sea Star Skip: Cut star shapes out of paper and place them around the floor. Have your preschooler stand on one of the sea stars. Give a direction for how to move from one sea star to the next. Jump on 2 feet, skip, gallop, tip toe, etc. Get fancy and give directions to get to the next 2 sea stars for an added challenge.

Shark Teeth: On the sidewalk, draw a huge shark with chalk. Make sure the shark has an open mouth. Use chalk to add sharp, triangular teeth in the shark’s mouth. Focus on smaller movements to make sure each tooth has a point. Count to see how many teeth in total the shark has. Consider drawing different sized sharks down the sidewalk and add teeth to each one!

Day 3

Read & Write: Read a book with the beach or ocean theme. It can be fiction or nonfiction. After the book is over, talk about what happened in the story. Focus on a favorite part or a favorite fact learned in the book. Get out crayons and paper and draw a picture of the part of the book you have talked about. Share your picture and tell what it is about!

Hide & Seek Seaweed: Practice number in a hide & seek kind of way! Print the seaweed page or draw your own. Use a white crayon to write numbers all around the seaweed page. Have your preschooler paint the seaweed page green with watercolors. Each time a number is painted, it will stay white! Try to find the numbers in order and name each one.

Day 4

Shell Print Painting: Gather real seashells from the beach or store bought shells. Pour a thin layer of paint on a plate. Dip the textured side of the shell into the paint and then stamp it on a piece of paper. Keep dipping and stamping different shells all over the paper. Fingers may get messy during this activity!

Crabby Grab: Scatter pom poms around the table. Use a clothespin or kid-friendly squeezers as crab pinchers. Pinch a pom pom and drop it in a bucket. Keep pinching and dropping the pom poms in the bucket one by one until they are all picked up. To make the crab game a little more difficult, pinch the clothespin with the other hand to pick up the pom poms!

Day 5

Paper Plate Octopus: Cut 1/3 from a paper plate. Paint or color the bigger part of the paper plate. This is the octopus body. With the cut side at the bottom, add eyes and a mouth to the octopus. Cut eight 1 inch strips of paper. Bend the strips back and forth like a fan. Glue the 8 arms on the octopus. Display your octopus when it’s finished!

Feed the Whales: Draw the outline of a whale on a paper or print the play dough page. Roll a die and count the dots showing. Feed that number of goldfish crackers, pom poms, or play dough rolled into balls to the whale. Clear off the whale food and roll again!

Extras

Shell Hopscotch: Draw a hopscotch board with chalk on the sidewalk. Play with a seashell instead of a rock. Toss the seashell, see where it lands, and start jumping! Use this game to practice number skills too.

Blowfish Bounce: Use a blown up balloon to play keep it up! Don’t let the blowfish touch the ground. Use your hands, belly, shoulders, feet, etc. to let the balloon blowfish bounce off of. See how many times you can hit the balloon before it touches the ground!

Download the watermelon theme editable planning sheet. Add learning ideas from the list below in this column or from the watermelon week activities!