Ocean Unit
- B Y
- Aug 24
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 28
If you're looking for simple and budget-friendly ways to keep toddlers or preschoolers busy, whether you're a stay-at-home parent, nanny, or preschool teacher, you've come to the right place! These ideas are great for toddlers - even little one-year-olds, and throughout my posts, I'll differentiate the activities for different age groups.
The objective for each of my units is to support the social emotional, language and communication, cognitive, and motor development of our precious little toddlers while they learn about the world around them.
I began my stay-at-home mom stage with my sweet little one-year-old by continuing his O-Fish-ally One birthday theme and created a little ocean unit for him. I would have loved to take him to the beach, but since we live in Arizona and weren't able to make it to a beach this summer, we took him to the aquarium instead. He thought it was pretty cool!
I then set up his little play corner for Day One with blue blankets and bath toys we already had. I threw in some other ocean related toys we had, and put his blue lego blocks in a bin so we could pretend it was water.
I bought a few inexpensive things to make our unit even more fun and will list the links for you below.
Ocean Books - You only need one or two. These are some of my favorite choices for younger toddlers.
Poke-a-Dot Ocean Book - wonderful book for developing fine motor skills, and counting. My toddler absolutely loves it, and of course it's developmenatlly appropriate that he only has the patience to poke one or two dots on each page. I help him poke the rest. :D
Under The Sea - Touch and Feel - for 1 year olds
Ocean Friends - Touch and Feel - for 1 - 2 year olds
Who is in the Ocean? - The creatures say things like wibble wobble, or glug glug. My toddler likes trying to imitate the sounds.
My First Book of Sea Animals - Just $1.99 on Amazon for Prime members
Who Am I? - A Lift-the-flap book
Games, Toys, Puzzles
Sensory Felt Board - If you've ever had a one-year-old, you know that one of their very favorite past times is tearing things, so I thought a felt wall would be the perfect way to let my son rip things off the wall with no harm, and showed him how to stick them back up. He really liked it, and older toddlers and preschoolers would have lots of fun with it, since they would understand how to place the fish and coral purposefully. Note: some of the fish came with googly eyes, and all have velcro dots on the back, so I supervised my toddler with it, and he actually didn't try to eat the eyes, which did suprise me. If you're nervous, you can always pull the eyeballs off and draw some on with a permanent marker, or just leave out the fish with eyes until your toddler stops putting everything in their mouth.
Find your Fish Felt Wall here. There are other Ocean felt wall options that you might like better. I chose this one because it was simple.
Fishing Game - the components of this game can be used multiple ways so get creative with it! My toddler crawled through his little tunnel and collected the fish. We also made a little boat with a laundry basket and put his stuffed animals in there so they could go fishing! (my son didn't want to be in the basket but was more than happy to put his animals in the boat.) :D
Get your Fishing Game here. It helps teach color matching and counting. For littles, they're learning the concept of the fish sticking to the velcro fishing rod, and we can take them off and place them in one of the buckets. I encourage my toddler by saying, "Yay! You caught a yellow fish!"
Ocean Puzzle - This is the only puzzle I found for one year olds. There are lots more to choose from for 2, 3, and 4 year olds. Also supervise one-year-olds with any wood puzzle, since they like to chew on toys.
Bath Bubbles - Float and play bubble toys
Wall Art
Ocean painting
For the simple tutorial and free fish printout, click here.
Ocean Animal Photos - Free Printables for the wall
You can make this unit for your toddler or preschool class as creative and fancy, or simple and budget-friendly as you want. Either way, I know they will love it as much as mine did!
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