Interactive Tides Activity | Printable | Free | K – 2
Interactive Tides Activity
Make an interactive tides activity that shows the tide pool going in and out. Includes a printable of ocean creatures. For grades Pre K to 2.
We are continuing our ocean theme this week, and the boys got to participate in our first science interactive notebook. If you are unfamiliar with interactive notebooks, it has become a popular trend where students take control of their learning by participating in note taking, strategic reading, or even foldable.
First, we tackled these ocean theme preschool activities.
I love how they allow the students to apply what they are learning in a fun, interactive way. Since they are in a notebook, it is easy for the students to go back to them and “review” their learning.
Megan Hayes-Golding has a very informative post about using an interactive notebook.
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What do You Teach Preschoolers about the Ocean?
Don’t you love when a random grab at the library turns into a gold mine? We picked up Discover Science: Ocean and Seas and have fallen in love with it.
It is an awesome book with very detailed pictures but written in verbiage that my Pre-K and Kindergartener understand. They love how the pictures have numbers next to them, and the details about it at the bottom of the page.
We have had fun looking for the numbers, and then reading about the picture.
As we read, we have been recording our thinking and attempting to draw pictures of it to help us visualize. Before we start reading again, we always go back and read our chart.
Today I decided it was time to let them apply what we have learned.
Tide Pool Activity Sheet
- First print off the free printable
- Then gather up crayons, scissors, glue sticks, black paper, white paper, and blue paper.
- Have a science interactive notebook nearby to glue the final product into.
Cut Out Worksheet Tide Pool Creatures
1. Color the ocean creatures.
First, we colored in the ocean creatures on the free printable.
2. Cut out the rocks.
Next, we cut the rocks out of black paper. My Pre-K little one’s rocks were really just rectangles, while my five-year-old’s looked more like circles. This is their notebook though, so that was fine.
I don’t expect them to make it Pinterest worthy, just participate and give it their best. We glued them at the top of our blank page.
3. Cut out the ocean creatures and sort them.
Now it was time to cut out the ocean creatures and their names.
Once that was done, we moved onto sorting them into two piles. Those that are in the tide pools and those that you would find in an ocean.
4. Glue the ocean creatures onto the paper.
Next, we glued the starfish, hermit crab, mussel, and crab in the rock pool. All around the rock pool, we colored the paper blue, and then the surrounding area brown for the sand. We also labeled the brown part as the beach and the rock area as the rock pool.
After completing the tide pool area, we grabbed our blue construction paper. We cut the blue paper so it was the same size as our original page, and then cut an additional inch or so off the bottom.
5. Create the tide pool with construction paper.
The next part took a little bit of fiddling with, and I will do my best to explain it. (If you are crafty, you can probably do this with your eyes closed.) I matched the bottom of the blue paper to the bottom of the original page.
We then pulled the blue page back towards me until the whole rock pool was totally visible. At this point, we simply folded the paper by pressing down and creating two creases. We put glue at the bottom of the blue paper until the first crease and glued it onto our original paper.
Then at one of the creases, we labeled it tide. We talked about when the ocean recedes it leaves behind rock pools, and when it comes back in it covers them up. We also labeled the top of the blue construction paper as the coast.
The boys were great at explaining in their preschool language that the coast was where the water and the sand meet.
Finally, we finished by gluing the shark, eel, whale, and octopus onto our blue paper.
Tide Pool Activities for Kids
The boys thoroughly enjoyed our afternoon project, but what really made me smile was when Grandma made a surprise visit. My Four year old grabbed his paper and began to explain to my mom all about tides and rock pools.
Throughout the whole conversation, he kept moving his blue construction paper up and down to illustrate the tide.
I absolutely love seeing them excited about what they are learning, and I can’t wait for us to make another entry in our notebook soon.
