When My Father’s World Kindergarten picked “O is for Octopus,” I started thinking, “but what octopus books are there? I can’t think of any.” I was right, there aren’t really any great octopus fiction books, but if you expand it out into ocean animals, there are a plethora of books you can find at the library. This leads us to this fun book list of ocean booklist or octopus booklist depending on how specific you want to be. And just as a note, I adapted this list for my daughter who I’m homeschooling preschool.

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Octopus Booklist

Future Ticia 2020 here, since my boys were in kindergarten the library has added some fun new books, so I’ve only read the first two books on this octopus booklist. The others look to be really good, and I picked the best my library has that I liked. There were actually 5 pages of the octopus booklist when I looked it up.

• How to Hide an Octopus– Fun book about how different animals camouflage. The kids had lots of fun reading this book and looking for the hiding animals.
• Giant Octopuses– A great factual book that the kids had lots of fun reading. After we read this we did our octopus page from their ocean animals book.
• Octopus Opposites– All sorts of animals introduce the opposites
• Inky the Octopus– Based on the true story of an octopus’ escape from an aquarium, Inky escapes to the ocean far away (and I do remember reading that news story and being wildly amused)
• Uh-oh Octopus!– Octopus is stuck inside his apartment and has to learn how to escape when the door is blocked. It looks to be really cute from the description
• Octopus Alone– Octopus is slowly learning how to make friends and learn how to interact with others
• Even an Octopus Needs a Home– This looks like a fun look at different animal homes
• Giant Pacific Octopus: the World’s Largest Octopus– a look at the giant pacific octopus with great pictures

Ocean booklist

All of these are the original books we used for our ocean booklist, except for two specific exceptions.

• Rainbow Fish-I think this book first came out when I was in high school it made the rounds of the soon-to-be teachers and we all loved it as a great book about sharing. I’ve heard some people look at it as a “way to buy friends,” but I think there are a lot of potentially great lessons in there. This is a popular book and we’ve read it several times.
• Rainbow Fish and the Tattle Tale; Copycat Fish– both of these are part of the “continuing Rainbow Fish” Adventures. I don’t quite see how it fits in with the continuity of Rainbow Fish (and yes I do realize I’m giving it a lot more credit than they probably thought about), but in these Rainbow Fish is a kid and he goes through the typical little kid problems. They’re fun short reads and can help if you’re having a problem with tattling, lying, or fill in the problem (I have 3 or 4 in this series, I think). I’ve actually linked to Rainbow Fish and the Big Blue Whale.
• A House for a Hermit Crab– A cute book about how a hermit crab goes around and builds his house. It progresses through the months of the year, and with each month he adds something to his house, and finally, at the end of the year he moves on to a new house. For those of you El-Ed majors, this is a marginal example of a circle book, it ends the same way it begins (there are a few minor differences, that’s why it’s marginal). This was quite popular, and I think I read it 3 times in a row before they let me stop reading it.
• Swimmy– this is a great book for talking about working together. Swimmy is a black fish in a sea of redfish, and the big fish always pick on them. They must solve the problem of how to work together. Truthfully, we read this one a while ago, and I don’t remember their reaction to it, but I love it, so I decided to include it here.
• Fish Faces– this one might be nonfiction, all in how you look at it. I think the call number was nonfiction. but, it’s pictures of different fish faces, and you decide how the fish are feeling. This is super cute and the kids loved looking at the different faces and guessing how the fish felt.

So, all of these we read before we worked on our Ocean Animals book. We would read about one or two animals and then while they made their animals I would write down what they told me.

• Sea Horses– The kids had lots of fun with this one because we had just seen sea horses the week before at the aquarium. They had fun trying to find the same ones we saw before. And of course, then we made our sea horses.
• Ocean Mammals- This one we kind of scanned and read some of it. It was aimed at a slightly older group. They kept relating it back to the movie we saw, so they did get more from the 3D movie than that you can wear the glasses as a bra……
• Orca calves– The original ocean mammals book we read is out of print and no longer at the library, so this looks like a great substitute along with…
• Whales and Dolphins
• Surprising Sharks– Another big hit and the illustrations are fun and different. After this, they kept making a point to tell me how sharks eat their brothers and sisters. Yeah……. That’s all they got from it. Sharks eat their brothers.
• Jellyfish-another great fact book. I love books like this that are written for early readers because it has just the right amount of information for a preschooler. While I love the Gail Gibbons books, I think the best ones of all are the Rookie Readers. They have one sentence per page and great pictures. Much less tendency to overwhelm my kids with too many facts.

Going beyond an ocean booklist or octopus booklist to more early learning fun

• Turtle picture books (My Father’s World booklist)
• Zoo animal craft book
• How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World lesson
• Days of Creation book (My Father’s World lesson)
• Sun and Shadow experiment (My Father’s World lesson)