How does an octopus move?

Hi! Future Ticia 2023 here, I’m going to add in a bit more for this particular post to make it a more solid science lesson and link you to a few other resources I’ve found since then. This is part of a larger unit on swimming creatures (man, I need to create a swimming creatures landing page, the closest I have is an ocean animals post), which is part of the larger zoology series.

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Back to how octopus move lesson

We started studying Octopuses, I learned the PROPER plural for that from our science book this past week.  Okay, there’s actually a debate about that, but still.

Future Ticia here, yeah, you would not believe the debate on that one. There is a lot of arguing on this point.

Part 1: Let’s get the reading done, how do octopuses move

First I gave the kids some various scrapbook papers (I grabbed random cool papers I had as choices), they chose blue and yellow, and let them have at it to make an octopus craft.  They pretty much all cut out a “ghost shape” and made fringe on the bottom. The Artist’s octopi all have amazing eyelashes. While they made those I took turns reading with the different kiddos.  Afterward, I was very amused to discover the similarities in their projects.

Alternative octopus craft: Ocean animals preschool book

Octopus resources

Okay, let’s look at the different resources I might have used. When we learned this specific lesson, we only used the Apologia Swimming Creatures textbook, BUT we had previously studied octopus when we used My Father’s World kindergarten, so I have a complete Octopus booklist.

This is fairly short, but I want to warn you the first little bit does have an octopus grabbing a shrimp to eat, if this will bother your kids.

How does an octopus move?

Next, we looked at my terrible brilliant drawing of an octopus expelling water.

We talked about how an octopus sucks in water, and then pushes it out, and that’s what pushes them through the ocean.

Future Ticia here, if you watched the videos up above, you can also see that they move using their tentacles, which is pretty fascinating.

Then I got out a turkey baster and we squeezed the bulb to feel the air coming out.  That let us feel what the water being pushed out did.

Now, you could follow this up by letting them play with it in the bathtub, or in the summer in the pool, but that would not have pictures of it for obvious reasons.

Finally we took some eye droppers I had and tried squeezing them underwater.

This part didn’t work so well because apparently someone had knocked the bulbs off, so we weren’t getting good suction with them.
But, with the various hands-on and “illustrations” we did, they did get the idea of how an octopus and other cephalopods move, so that’s all good.

Some more cool early elementary ideas

• Ireland Unit– also updated with what we did for high school
• Nature Study tips and tricks
• Graphing Green Eggs and Ham
• Elephant lesson
• 5 beginning chapter book series for boys

Cover picture provided by Folbo and was modified to add text and an overlay