Ocean Unit

We've been working on this ocean unit for a long time because I keep allowing summer to "get in the way". Haha! I told myself we could still do preschool through the summer, as long as we didn't miss the fun summer things because of it. And I'm a-ok with that. So these last few weeks we've done a lot of fun summer stuff, and in between we've been learning about the ocean. This was a fun unit that I put together myself, again modeling off the ones on homeschoolcreations.com. I still have some finishing touches to add to the PDF so it's not quite ready to post yet, but I'll get it up asap, and then those of you interested can print it off. But here are some of the activities we did.

We made ocean scenes. All kinds of ocean scenes. Lincoln had such a fun time doing the desert diorama, that I decided we'd do an ocean one as well. The method was inspired by my sister-in-law Sydni, who did a similar one a few years back for her son Zac. We took a cereal box and taped it shut, and then cut the front out of it. The big piece of cardboard off of the front, I gave to Ivan to use for his ocean scene. Then Lincoln painted the inside of the box light blue. Once that was dry, he took a dark blue and a sponge and sponged some dark blue lightly on top of the light, to give the water some texture. I thought that effect turned out great. Then we spread glue thickly across the bottom and put fake sand on, for the bottom of the sea. You could easily use real sand, I just happened to have some of the fake stuff left over from another project. Then we used green tissue paper to make sea weed. We just cut a rectangular piece and scrunched it together and glued it down. I thought it turned out awesome. Next I let Lincoln pick which sea creatures he wanted, and we cut those out, and poked a hole in the top of the cereal box and ran a string through it and taped the sea creature to the string. This way if you blow on it, it can "swim". Cool. For the finishing touches I let Linc put little fish stickers all over the back ground. Ivan did all the same steps we did, only his was on just a flat piece of cardboard, so we glued his creatures down, but his turned out great too, so either way.

One of the afternoons, Lincoln (with my encouragement while I did dishes) made an ocean scene out of play dough. I had to teach him how to use the cookie cutters, but once he got it he was on a roll. I think there were 5 sharks at one point. :)

We did a lot of practice with letters and writing this unit as well. Not all at once though, just a little bit here and there.

I like to do writing in a lot of different way. Sometimes I have him trace words, or sometimes I call out letters for him to write...but my favorite way is to either have him write with sidewalk chalk, or, on the windows with dry erase markers. Something about both of those just makes it a little bit more fun. This time around we did window markers. He took of his vocabulary cards and looked at each letter in the word and copied them onto the window. It was a bit of a challenge for him, so we'll probably do that activity again. But I like having him see and recognize a letter, and then be able to turn around and reproduce it. We also did a couple of beginning sound activities. On one set of cards he had a picture, and then had to choose from three letters which one made the beginning sound. On anther set of cards, he got to see the picture and the rest of the word, but where the first letter was there was a blank that he had to fill in. Circling the beginning letter was really easy for him, filling in the blank was a little tougher but he did do it, which makes me think that is the perfect activity. It's right at his difficulty level right now.

And even though Lincoln can write all his letters all by himself, there are a few that need some work. So I made up cards in this unit for him to practice C and S capital and lower case.  I don't think I took a picture of them though, at least I can't find it. :) Most of our handwriting stuff, I laminate using contact paper, so that we can write with dry erase markers, and wipe it off and do it again if need be. Also, so I don't have to reprint everything for Ivan in a year or so. I should probably just buy a laminater, it would save me a LOT of time.

Lincoln's favorite activity was probably the "Hungry Sharks". I made up cards, and on each card was a shark with a number underneath him. On another sheet were a whole bunch of little fish. Lincoln cut those all out, and then he would look at the card. The number on the card represented how many fish the shark wanted to eat. Lincoln had to count out and glue down the correct number of fish to go with each card. I had enough cards to do 0-10 but I think we're at a point in our counting that I need to start going to at least 12, maybe even 15.

Something new I made for this unit was picking the odd one out. I did three of the same picture, but then one one of them I made something different, like I put shoes on one start fish. Then Lincoln took a wooden clothes pin and had to pin it on the picture that was different.

I also had him do "Ocean Things" and "Non Ocean Things" again, because he had so much fun with it when we did it for our desert unit. He had to cut out different pictures and decide which ones went in the ocean and which ones did not, and then glue them in their appropriate place. I think once we get to the end of all our habitats, I'll put together one where he has to put things in the correct habitat. That will be fun.

We made puppets with cardstock and popcicle sticks again. We made a little play on the book Brown Bear Brown Bear by Eric Carlyle. But instead we did blue whale blue whale, what do you see? I see a dolphin looking at me, and so on down through the sea creature puppets. It was fun.

We were also lucky enough one of the weeks, to score the Under the Sea story kit from the library. One of the books they had was about a submarine, and Lincoln loved it. I hadn't thought to add anything about submarines to our unit, and I wish I had. But I was able to quickly to a google search, and came up with this submarine craft. We made it, and hung it up on the sliding glass door, and then I decided that we needed to make another ocean scene out of it. I got out the dry erase markers again and we went to work. Lincoln drew himself inside the sub, an octopus, a jelly fish, the sun, and a big clown fish. He had me draw a little clown fish, a purple fish, a crab, and a lobster.

One of the activities in the story kit was about submarines. It had us fill up a big container of water, and then use an empty sour cream container as our sub. At first the container floats on the top, so you put a little water inside it and it sinks a little, put a little more water and it sinks a little further, and so on, until you get the sub to stay under water. It explained that real submarines work like this too. They have a compartment that takes in or lets out water depending on how deep they want to be in the water. Lincoln thought this was the most amazing thing. Over the next several days, he showed the trick to anyone who would go in the back yard with him. So I was glad we added a submarine section to our unit.

I did the usual file folder stuff too. Our book reviews, and the papers Lincoln practiced writing his name on, and some extra pictures of the ocean went on the front. Inside is our ocean vocab, the first sounds cards, our sorting of ocean and non ocean things, our tracing sheets and first letter sheets, and our hungry shark cards. On the back is a board game I made. Lincoln loves the board game again, so I'm glad I added it too.

We also read some good books.


Overall, I'd say our ocean unit was a success. I'm still working on the PDF but as soon as I get the finishing touches on it, I'll post the link so that you can see it, and use it if you like.

For our next unit I'm using the Knights Preschool Pack off of homeschoolcreations.com