Ocean Animals Book Craft

There are some days you are on top of your Mommy game.  You’ve kept the kids entertained, they’ve learned stuff, and the house is clean.  Okay, I’ve never achieved this last one, but I achieved the first two with this ocean animals book craft as part of homeschooling preschool.

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Ocean Animals Book supplies

blank books, crepe paper, construction paper, glitter glue (I swear we go through rivers of this stuff), aluminum foil, markers
So here goes. I have a bunch of premade books I got on sale last year at Lakeshore Learning, on the bottom it has lines for writing and the top has space for a picture. I figured this was the perfect project to use them with.

Starfish page

On Monday we read about Starfish and created a starfish (vaguely inspired by this post at Casa Camacho, which no longer exists).

1. Draw a star shape on your construction paper, of course, it must be in your child’s favorite color unless you want to hear lots of crying.

2. Let them color it. Hopefully, you can still see the lines after this.

3. Now let them put glitter glue all over. This gives the proper bumpy feel to go with starfishes. After it’s dry cut it out and glue it in the books (and hopefully no one has stepped or sat on the wet glue in the process….)

Jellyfish page

No, you don’t use this to make peanut butter and jelly.

Of course, first you need some friends to watch you.

1. Get some streamers out of a small 2-inch section and make a half circle to be the bell of the jellyfish (see I learned something too. Now let your kid have fun shredding a 6-inch portion of the streamer.

2. Put some glue on your page and then put the tentacles down. On top of that put the piece for the bell. Then shake your head as your child manages to unroll the entire thing of streamers. Oh boy……..

Oh, and my kids have decided I can make anything, including a “space guy” out of streamers…..

Octopus page

And I learned this week that a very large octopus can fit in a very small space.

To make the octopus, take your kids’ hand and arrange it on the page with the fingers spread out. Now, trace their hand. Then pick up their hand and rearrange their fingers. Ignore their cries that you’re pinching their hand and trace just the fingers again to get a nice little octopus.

Now let your kid color like crazy.

Sea Horse

The Daddy sea horse carries the babies in his pocket. I don’t have a pocket Mommy.

Notice Batman’s nice fancy scab. It’s developing into quite a nice scar.

1. Draw a rough sketch of a sea horse on construction paper. Did you save the rest of the page you didn’t use before? There’s an advantage to not cleaning up right away, or we can call it foresight, and that’s why I kept it sitting on the floor next to our table.

2. Let your kid have a blast gluing lots and lots of huge sequins all over. Then after it’s dried for at least 30 seconds cut it out and glue it into your book.

Sharks page

Did you know that tiger shark babies start off as a litter of 6, but by the time they’re born that the baby sharks have eaten their brothers and sisters so there is usually only 2 born? My kids are fascinated by this.

1. Draw a shark in the book. Realize you really should have done this elsewhere, cut it out, and glued it in. Oh well.

2. Give your child a small square of aluminum foil. Show them how to tear it and glue it on to make it feel/look like shark skin. Shake your head as they make a very funky looking shark by the time their done.

Whales page

Whales are not fish Mommy. They make funny sounds.

Ummm…. By this time I was feeling lazy and I had some errands to run that afternoon, so we just colored the whale and dolphin. But, if you wanted to you could have them color it over sandpaper and that would make a super cool texture feel for it.

Dolphins page

Dolphins sing Mommy. They don’t eat bad guy food.

Yeah, they were really obsessed with bad guy food.

Here’s the list of ocean life that don’t eat bad guy food: octopus, whales, hermit crab, dolphin, jellyfish, starfish. There was great disagreement on whether or not sharks were bad guys or not.

More preschool crafts

• Yertle the Turtle preschool craft
• Itsy Bitsy Spider Interactive poem
• Monster Preschool unit
• Zoo Animal preschool unit
• Rabbit preschool unit

And if you’re studying swimming creatures, I’ve got a Swimming Creatures Pinterest board.

Originally published October 13, 2009