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Fun Ocean Animal Activities for Kindergarten

There’s something about ocean animals that gets young students excited about learning!  In this post, I’m going to share some of fun ocean animal activities for kindergarten.  These hands-on and engaging activities will help your students practice a variety of math and literacy skills as they learn more about the ocean!

Ocean animal activities for kindergarten

All About Ocean Animals

These ocean animal activities are a great way to incorporate more science into your school day.  With everything our students are learning in language arts and math, it can be tricky to fit everything into daily lesson plans!  These kindergarten ocean animal activities incorporate other content area practice to make the most of your instructional time.

Sea Turtle Activities

There are so many interesting facts that students can learn about sea turtles! 

All About Sea Turtles craft
Sea turtle writing craftivity

After you read a non-fiction book about sea turtles together as a class, students can write and illustrate their favorite fact about sea turtles.  Then, they can create this adorable sea turtle craft to put on top.  The end result is an adorable lift-the-flap sea turtle craft!

Fish Activities

There are so many interesting varieties of fish!  You can choose a nonfiction book to read with your class. Students can record their favorite fact about fish with writing craftivity.

All About Fish craft
All About Fish writing

After reading “The Rainbow Fish” as a class, students can create their own rainbow fish to go along with their writing.

Cover of a writing craftivity for The Rainbow Fish
A rainbow fish writing craftivity

This missing number activity is a fun way to help students practice counting by one, five, and ten.

Counting by tens fish worksheet
Fish lift-the-flap addition and subtraction activity

For some fish-themed math practice, students can practice addition and subtraction with this lift-the-flap activity!  They will match each fish to the correct addition or subtraction equation.

Fish cards for an addition and subtraction game

Your students will also love this fish-themed addition and subtraction card game!  Students will take turns flipping over one of their fish cards containing an addition or subtraction equation.  After calculating the answer, students will decide which one is greater and the student with the larger number gets to keep both cards.

Shark Activities

All About Sharks Craft
All About Sharks writing activity

After completing their own shark craftivity with a fun fact about sharks, you can read “Clark the Shark Dares to Share” by Bruce Hale.  Students can create their own craft to accompany a page of writing about how they will share like Clark! 

Clark the Shark writing craftivity

A hungry shark also makes engaging, hands-on subtraction practice!  Students can use a shark subtraction mat to model different equations. They can continue this practice with another hungry shark subtraction activity!

Shark subtraction mat
Shark themed subtraction activity

Whale Activities

All About Whales craft
All About Whales writing

Students can share their favorite facts about whales with this adorable craftivity.  Then, they can identify missing addends by acting out a hungry whale scenario with ten goldfish crackers. 

Whale subtraction activity with goldfish crackers
Whale subtraction word problem mini reader

A hungry whale can also serve as inspiration for subtraction practice in this mini-reader!

Dolphin Activities

Kindergarten students love to talk about dolphins! 

All About Dolphins craft
Dolphin writing craftivity

After creating a fun dolphin craft, students can also look for the dolphin on this ocean animal color by code activity. This is great addition and subtraction practice!

Ocean animal color by code

Crab Activities

Crab craft
Crab writing craftivity

Crabs are another fun ocean animal to learn about in kindergarten!  After creating an All About Crabs writing craftivity, you can read “A House for Hermit Crab” by Eric Carle. 

Sequencing activity for "A Home for Hermit Crab"
Hermit crab writing activity

After reading the story, students can practice sequencing as they put the different sea creatures in the order the hermit crab meets them and adds them to his shell.  Students can also write about what they would use to decorate the hermit crab’s shell.  

Hermit crab craft

You can even have students decorate their own hermit shell craft to go along with their writing!

Crab subtraction activity

These adorable paper crab manipulatives are perfect for modeling ocean animal word problems! This interactive subtraction stories book is great way to bring some extra engagement to math practice.

Octopus Activities

All About Octopuses craft
Octopus writing craftivity

Students can start by writing and illustrating a fact about octopuses to go with this adorable octopus craft.

Tickly octopus craft and writing activity

You can read “Tickly Octopus” by Ruth Galloway and then have students create this fun writing craftivity!

Painting tentacles on octopus worksheet
Addition story problems

You can also bring some octopus fun to math practice!  Students can add tentacles to an octopus to show how many more they need to get to eight.  They can also practice addition in word problem form with paper octopus manipulatives.

Clam Activities

Students are always so interested in the fact that the shells that they find in the sand were once homes to animals!

Shell themed math practice worksheet

You can add some clam-themed activities to your math practice. Students can match addition and subtraction equations to each number on this printable math activity.

Addition and subtraction bingo

Your students will also love playing addition and subtraction bingo! They will add a number to each clam and starfish on their Bingo cards.  This is a great way to ensure unique cards while giving students a chance to practice number formation!

Under the Sea Adventure board game

Students can also practice addition and subtraction as they play this Under the Sea Adventure board game!

Even More Ocean Animal Activities for Kindergarten

After learning about all of the different ocean animals, students will be ready to vote on their favorite!

My favorite ocean animal graphing worksheet

Your students can record their votes on a class graph.  Then they can record and interpret the data on their own graphing worksheet.

My Favorite Ocean Animal crab craft
My Favorite Ocean Animal writing

Students can also create a fun writing craftivity to share about their favorite ocean animal!

Cover of Splash in our Ocean class book
One page of a class book

Another fun ocean animal activity is this class book inspired by “Splash in the Ocean!” by Mik Zepol. Students can learn more about nouns and verbs as they write and illustrate their own page for the class book.

All About the Ocean Unit Study

All of the ocean animal activities shown above (and more!) can be found in one easy-to-download ocean unit study for kindergarten. You can use these hands-on and engaging activities to plan a fun thematic unit for your students.  This resource even includes a helpful PDF that outlines a suggested sequence for these activities.

Cover of an All About the Ocean book

If you’d like to take a closer look at all of the ocean animal activities included in this resource, you can find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or on TPT.

Ocean math and ELA activities
Ocean unit - Click here to shop my website
Ocean Unit - Click here to shop my TPT store

Save These Ocean Animal Activities for Kindergarten

Be sure to save this post if you’d like to come back to these fun kindergarten ocean animal activities!  Just add the pin below to your favorite teaching board on Pinterest.  You’ll be able to quickly find these activities whenever you’re ready to plan an ocean thematic unit! You might also be interested in looking at my Earth Day activities for kindergarten if you want your students to learn more about how to protect the environment, including the animals in our oceans.

Ocean animal kindergarten activities