Interested in teaching your children more about the ocean? Make a day out of it! Here are some ideas for planning a day filled with lots of ocean themed fun.
Make an octopus’s garden snack with a bell pepper as the body and 8 legs wallowing in the dip of your choice. Use black olives for eyes by sticking them onto the body with dip. You could also eat Goldfish crackers, have fish fillets for lunch, or even try slurping soup through your teeth like a baleen whale!
Using flashcards and headbands we played our own version of guess who. Instead of the person wearing the headband asking questions, the non-headband people gave facts about the certain animal until the headband wearer was able to guess. We also played a quick drawing game where we each took turns drawing sea creatures on the magnetic drawing board. That kept us laughing for a good hour, it turns out my sea creature drawing skills are lacking!
Make simple jellyfish using plastic fruit cups, yarn, and ribbon. Poke a hole in the top of a fruit cup and paint it if you’d like, gather up the yarn and ribbon you want to use for tentacles and tie them into a knot at the top. Tie a string under the knot, bring it up through the hole, and hang your jellyfish up. Make undersea paintings by using bubble wrap to create prints. Just paint bubble wrap then press it onto paper to make a print, once it’s dry, glue pictures of sea creatures onto it. You can cut out pictures from a magazine or draw/paint your own, get creative!
We chose to do a couple simple experiments but there are so many others online. You could do a whole day of nothing but science experiments! We made currents by blowing on the surface of water we had in a baking dish, then we added a drop of food coloring and watched it swirl around the dish until the water was completely colored. We also experimented with salt water density by placing an egg in fresh water, where it sank, and then slowly adding salt to the water until the egg floated to the surface.
These are just a few ideas to get you started in planning a whole day around the ocean. There are so many different things to learn about the ocean, and just think, 95% of the world’s oceans are still unexplored!
