The Little Octopus And The Oceans...

Children LOVE to study oceans and the life inside of them.  Shells, fish, whales, coral, water...especially the octopus!

In all my years as lead "awakener" here at Woolsey Academy, the octopus ranks right up there in preschool land with the dinosaur.  

It has 8 arms or tentacles, it has a squishy body, it squirts black ink it has suction cups!!!  What isn't to LOVE about these amazing creatures of the deep?

This month our educational partners at Mother Goose Time paid homage to this amazing ocean dweller with this sweet study and craft.  

They provided a math study counting it's arms by adding and subtracting to make 8.  We added another lesson to that curing our S.T.E.A.M. project by adding these fun round stickers to create "suckers" on the tentacles as we counted how many we added.  We then brought a little introduction of multiplication as we stated that, "If I have 2 suckers on each arm (8 arms total), how many do I have all together?"  

We counted by 2's and then we observed that we had 16!  

After reading the book, "How To Hide An Octopus", we pretended to be an octopus and find camouflage to hide in, on, and under.  We practiced using these positional words (pre-math and language comprehension) as our older children assisted our littler ones in performing the task.  

​The Amazing Octopus!

This S.T.E.A.M. project required our little learners to practice their fine motor skills as they stuffed ribbons with their fingertips into a shower cap!  We tied off a top portion of the cap and then our preschoolers used scissors to snip eight octopus arms.  The thin lightweight cap plastic was PERFECT for giving the impression of an octopus swimming through the water as it went up and down. 

This project, provided by Mother Goose Time in conjunction with our octopus studies was  a fantastic "Make and Take" activity for our children to excitedly share with their families as they reconnected and discussed everything they learned in their day with us at www.woolseyacademy.com.

As always, we wish you well and we hope you get to play today!