Ocean

Books

🌿🌻Over in the Ocean by Marianne Berkes (illustrated by Jeanette Canyon)
This reimagining of “Over in the Meadow” features high-definition illustrations done in bright polymer clay by Jeannette Canyon. We count ocean animals and their babies from 1 to 10 in song and at the end find additional information about the 10 animals and about coral reefs as well as classroom tips for extension activities. Available in a board book!

🌿🌻Nerdy Babies: Oceans by Emmy Kastner
This book explores many facets of the ocean in simple illustrations and text explanations. Some of the ocean is shallow, bright and warm.  Most of the ocean is vast and cold, some of the ocean is deep and dark, and some of the ocean is *icy* cold.  Marine life around the world are adapted to live in each of these spaces.  I love the message that scientists, like babies, are still discovering new things about our planet’s oceans.

🌿🌻Sharks (from the American Museum of Natural History’s “Science for Toddlers” series)
This photo-illustrated board book introduces young children to nine different species of sharks.  Each page spread provides information in two to four sentences.

🌿🌻Who’s Hiding at the Beach? by Katharine McEwen
This cute board book gives two dozen lift-the-flap facts about animals from seashores around the world!  Learn about seals, crabs, shorebirds, fish, sea turtles, dolphins, and more!

🌿🌻O is for Octopus by DK Publishing (illustrated by Kaja Kajfez)
This illustrated Animal Alphabet board book features alliterative facts about octopuses from around the world, including the common octopus, flapjack octopus, and the atlantic white spot octopus.

🌿🌻S is for Seal by DK Publishing (illustrated by Jean Claude)
This illustrated Animal Alphabet board book features alliterative facts about seals from around the world, including elephant seals, harbor seals, and ribbon seals!

🌿🌻U is for Urchin by DK Publishing (illustrated by Kaja Kajfez)
This illustrated Animal Alphabet board book features alliterative facts about urchins from around the world, including Pacific sand dollars, sea potatoes, and long-spined sea urchins.

🌿🌻W is for Whale by DK Publishing (illustrated by Livi Gosling)
This illustrated Animal Alphabet board book features alliterative facts about whales from around the world, including humpback whales, sperm whales, minke whales, and dolphins.

🌿🌻🌿🌻Coral and Seashell by Amy Sky Koster (illustrated by Lisel Jane Ashlock)
These board books are beautifully illustrated.  Simple text describes different corals and sea shells in 1-2 words with a loose rhyme scheme.  A guide at the back of the book shares the full common names for each figure illustrated.  While made with reinforced cardstock, the pages of this book lack the laminated finish and rounded page corners of typical board books, which can make them a bit less resilient against babies, toddlers, and the outdoors.

🌿🌻Beach Baby by Laurie Elmquist (illustrated by Ella MacKay)
This simple board book describes the many captivating things at the beach which will still be there when a child wakes up.  This book is a beautiful “lullaby” written for children reluctant to leave the wonders of the ocean for a nap.

🌿🌻Rainbow Sea by Jane Edgecomb (illustrated by Christian Riese Larsen)
This beautiful sparkle-filled board book is full of wonderful rhythm and rhymes following the antics of dolphins and reef fish from moonlight to sunrise to sunset. This book is ultimately a celebration of the many colors that can be found in a coral reef.

🌿🌻Whales and Dolphins At Your Fingertips by Judy Nayer (illustrated by Greg Harris)
This large board book came up through my childhood and features five pagespreads about cetaceans and dolphins including anatomy, diet, and behavior. The images on the righthand side are cutout and stack from bottom to top so each page subject can be seen from the front of the book. My one critique is that the book groups orcas only under “toothed whales” without also mentioning that they are the largest members of the dolphin family. Porpoises get a brief mention but no representation.

🌿Over & Under the Waves by Kate Messner (illustrated by Christopher Silas Neal)
A parent and child kayak out on the ocean, seeing seals, birds, and whales above the water’s surface while many more unseen animals pass below them underneath the waves.  At the end of their day, they return to shore, seeing other sea life at the tidepools and beach.  More information about each animal is given at the end of the book.

🌿The Big, Big Sea by Martin Waddell (illustrated by Jennifer Eachus)
When you picture a beach, you usually picture it in bright daylight or a picturesque sunrise or sunset. This book takes us to the beach at night under the bright moon as a small girl and her Mama visit the water’s edge, walking in the sand and wading in the dark sea. Waddell’s story celebrates this small but magical moment in time, seeing our small place in the world against the vastness of the big, big sea.

🌿Secrets of the Sea by Evan Griffith (illustrated by Joanie Stone)
This beautifully-illustrated book tells the story of early marine biologist Jeanne Power, who invented the first aquariums for scientific study and made significant contributions to the study of animal behavior in marine life. This book covers how she started studying animal behavior, how her inventions furthered her ability to study the behavior of sea creatures, how her fastidious research on argonauts held up to the scientific scrutiny of her peers, and how she boldly defended her achievements against men who tried to take credit for them.

🌿The Girl Who Built an Ocean by Jess Keating (illustrated by Michelle Mee Nutter)
This illustrate 2022 book also tells Jeanne Power’s story, though her scientific contributions get a late start after a lengthy exposition covering her marriage and work as a seamstress and the story abruptly ends with her solving the mystery of the argonaut shell.

🌿Ocean Speaks: How Marie Tharp Revealed the Ocean’s Biggest Secret by Jess Keating (illustrated by Katie Hickey)

🌿Kid Scientist: Marine Biologists on a Dive by Sue Fliess (illustrated by Mia Powell)
This illustrated book describes the work of marine biologists in the field, starting with the necessary period of research on gray whales before their field work begins. (How else would they determine the best time and place to conduct their research?)

🌿Oceans by Carron Brown (illustrated by Becky Thorns)
This Shine-a-Light book highlights different marine life from the world’s five oceans, including narwhals, leatherback turtles, jellyfish, and sea otters.

🌿Secrets of The Seashore by Carron Brown (illustrated by Alyssa Nassner)
This Shine-a-Light book describes wildlife that live in tidepools next to the ocean, including mussels, sea anemones, crabs, and starfish.

🌿Coral Reefs by Gail Gibbons
This illustrated nonfiction book explores the three types of coral reefs as geological formations, the three zones of a coral reef, as well as the many fish and corals that make up a reef. The text is not especially linear and divided up into different text boxes that allow you to pick and choose how much to read, but a full read-through can help you learn everything you might want to know about reefs before starting this unit.

🌿Ana and the Sea Star by R. Lynne Roelfs (illustrated by Jamie Hogan)
A young girl finds a sea star on the beach and learns more about it with her father before they gently release it back to the water.

🌿Fish by Brendan Kearney
In this story, Finn and Skip venture out on the ocean for a fishing trip and find a sea of trash! With no fish to be seen, Finn hauls in net after net of garbage. A group of beach-cleaning children offer to dispose of his haul and explain how plastics in the ocean harm animals and break down into microplastics that can poison animals and even get into our drinking water. As Finn finds ways to properly recycle or reuse materials, and continue cleaning the beach, the animals return to the ocean.

The Fish With the Deep Sea Smile by Margaret Wise Brown (illustrated by Henry Fisher)
This fiction book has all the wonderful rhythms and rhymes I expect from a MWB book and this one holds up so well I often get the words stuck in my head. I haven’t seen the original version, but the cute illustrations of Henry Fisher in the 2013 edition are bright and colorful.

Creative Art Opportunities

🦈Collage with fish confetti
🦈Painting with sponges
🦈Collage with multicolored tissue paper
🦈Collage with weedy crepe paper
🦈Watercolor painting
🦈Create an image out of smooth seashells in a tray of sand

Hands On Experiences

⛅️Explore ocean animals in a water table
⛅️Explore shells and stones in a water table
⛅️Explore shells and stones in dry sand
⛅️Explore natural driftwood
⛅️Explore fine sand at the bottom of a water table
⛅️Build a cardboard box-diorama for ocean animals to play in
⛅️Cover a large cardboard box with coral cutouts (like Henri Matisse) to turn the box into a reef cave
🌿Take ocean animals outdoors to a splash pool
🌿Jump and splash in water like a breaching dolphin or whale
🌿Visit a sandy summer beach
🌿Visit a local aquarium or fish store
🌿Visit the ocean together
🌿Explore a natural tide pool together (shoes on!)

Songs to Learn and Sing

“Once I Caught a Fish Alive” – traditional nursery rhyme and fingerplay

1, 2, 3, 4, 5– once I caught a fish alive
6, 7, 8, 9, 10– then I let it go again!
Why did you let it go?
Because it bit my finger so!
Which finger did it bite?
This little finger on my right!

“Slippery Fish” – Charlotte Diamond, 1985 (though there are now many versions used)

A slippery fish, a slippery fish
Swimming in the water
A slippery fish, a slippery fish
Gulp gulp gulp
Oh no! He got eaten by…

An octopus, an octopus,
Wiggling in the water
An octopus, an octopus,
Gulp gulp gulp
Oh no! He got eaten by…

A tuna fish… Splashing in the water…
A great white shark… lurking in the water…
A humongous whale…. spouting in the water…
Burp!

“A Sailor Went to Sea” – traditional nursery rhyme

A sailor went to sea, sea, sea
To see what he could see, see, see
But all that he could see, see, see
Was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea

“Baby Beluga” – Raffi

NIYN – Ocean on Spotify
All playlists are works in progress and are actively curated when I have a unit in play or preparation, so new songs may appear and old songs may be removed if they don’t suit my designs.