Sensory Sea~Side!

 Hello Ocean is a book about the ocean and our five senses.  It shows the different things you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell at the ocean.

Sensory learning is a very important part of teaching, especially teaching pre~schoolers.  The more senses engaged during the learning process the more parts of the brain are being used, the more parts of the brain being used, the more deeply concepts are stored in the brain, aka, they learn better.

Our vocabulary: seaweed, shore, aromas, hue

We brain~stormed and made a list of the different things the girl saw, smelt, tasted, heard, and felt while at the ocean's shore.

We then played ocean sounds from iTunes and identified the different sounds.  

Time for some sensory learning.

I let the children paint bubble wrap blue

 then had them press the bubble wrap to their paper, paint~side~down.

then they glued tiny sea~shells to the bottom of their ocean for the ocean floor,

 They finished up by adding foam ocean creatures to their bubbly ocean art.

While they were gluing on their blue ocean animals I asked them if they remembered what camouflage meant.  I am happy to report, they did!  YES!!

Next we painted ocean animals to use for a project tomorrow.

  They loved sitting on the floor to paint.  

Time to work on some writing.  I added a few drops of vanilla to the paint we used while creating these ocean books.

The children wrote the name of the ocean animal, then used our new stamps from Oriental Trading Company to stamp that animal to their page.

Here are the pages of their books

As always, they were so proud of their books.  The children really love to write.  

After creating our Who Lives in My Ocean book, we explored these sensory tubs.

I found two ocean animal yube~tubes at Hobby Lobby, added in some tiny seashells and let the kids loose to explore until their hearts were content or the floor had to be mopped.  Ha ha ha

I turned back on The Sounds of the Ocean while they examined their ocean sensory tubs and there were many questions about the name of various ocean animals they had yet to see and discussion about the ones they had already learned.  

After a morning of sensory learning it was time to eat lunch.

Pizza, mango, strawberries, carrots, cucumbers, with dip and milk.

After lunch we practiced writing our names, explored our sensory tubs a bit  more, and played with our pirates.

See you tomorrow!

Ms. P.