Exploring The Ocean With Young Children: Homeschool Preschool Week 2

Hi Friends!

Just writing a quick post to recap our homeschool day today! We’re following along with The Chirping Moms homeschool preschool program and this week was all about Oceans! I didn’t have the opportunity to do school with both boys- this week was very busy with Zay’s therapy open house and loads of cleaning and weekly prep. I was able to get an hour of school time with Isaiah in, here‘s what we did! Since we only had an hour today we jumped right in with crafts and skipped circle time.

Handprint Octopus: When I saw this craft, I thought it was so cute! We mixed white and purple paint to do a handprint. We followed up with using Q-Tips to dot Mr. Octopuses additional tentacles. Loved how creative this was while also working on fine motor skills which is what we are really trying to improve with Zay! I added google eyes and a smile once his painting was dry.

After painting, we did a follow up fine motor activity suggested by The Chirping Moms; pipe cleaner fishing! The way she suggested to do it involved putting the pipe cleaner fish in a jar but we found that to be a little too difficult. Zay ended up finding his own way to get the hook in the fishtail with using his hands to loop the fish in and out.

Next we did some goldfish counting! Goldfish were apart of our suggested lesson snack and we already had some in stock! Counting them was my idea and I had Zay transfer them from one bowl to another. While we snacked, I had some spare ocean animal coloring sheets that I thought would be fun to do! I gave him a choice to use markers or crayons and he chose markers! Love coloring with my little guy!

The books we listened to were: “It’s A Seashell Day” and “Room On Our Rock” both available on YouTube to listen! The Chirping Moms suggested these two and other books for this play lesson! Surprisingly Room On Our Rock is a Usborne book- how neat! I love the message of that story and will probably end up purchasing it for our home library. So cute!

We Sang: Baby Shark, Slippery Fish and One Little Blue Fish with all the hand movements. Isaiah loves baby shark the most.

Last I ended our day with some sensory time! I grabbed some play sand and a few ocean animal stencils. I was surprised how little he was interested in doing this activity, he only stuck around for about 10 minutes before moving on to something else. He usually loves getting his hands involved but I think he was experiencing sensory overload due to me painting his hands for the first activity already. This was a fun week and I’m so glad we got to do more of the suggested activities without to many tweaks! I’ll be writing about Homeschool week three and it’s a good one- the theme is construction!