Under the Sea crafts to keep the kids entertained

My Easter crafting post got a really good response, so I thought I’d write another one. With summer on the horizon, I decided to share this topic from Alfie’s home learning programme. I noticed he was more likely to do the activities if it was something he liked or was something he was familiar with – even if it was just 10 minutes! He loved the Easter puppets – and loads of you did too.

The puppets are such a quick and easy idea and you can get printables on pretty much everything! I absolutely love the Simple Mom Project, which is where I got lots of Alfie’s downloads from. You need to subscribe with your name and email address, but it’s so worth it – Kaitlen’s emails are full of free resources, and she mixes it up with some mum life/real talk thrown in too, which is so refreshing! Oh, and she responds to emails too!

You can print the resources in colour, but I much prefer printing in black & white and colouring them in myself. There are plenty of options in this ocean creature craft link, but I downloaded the starfish, octopus and clam printables. Like the Easter craft, I coloured them in, laminated them and then attached lolly sticks to the starfish and clam puppets. The octopus ones had long tentacles so wouldn’t hold the weight of a stick, but that didn’t matter. I only laminated them to protect them from little hands – but found that craft PVA didn’t stick the parts or the stick together, so had to use super glue instead… there’s no chance they’ll be destroyed now!

The shark crafts would be perfect for fans of Baby Shark… you could even print multiple sheets and decorate them to look like mummy, daddy, grandma and grandpa – while singing the song and having a dance!

Here are some other under the sea themed things we got up to that week: 

• Sensory play – we put Alfie’s sea creatures (and the rest!) in the paddling pool, but you could add shaving foam, make slime or something more interesting/fun! 
• Sandpaper sandcastles – a great textures activity. We cut out simple shapes and let Alfie ‘build’ castles. We even had sandpapers of different textures, so some were coarser than others, which added to the element of touch. 
• Handprint fishes – we used different coloured paint and card to print on. I then mounted them onto blue card and created a seabed scene, using felt tip pens. 
• Make an aquarium – you could do this using an old box, but I kept it simple. We painted a piece of bubble wrap with blue water coloured paint and stuck on cut-out shapes (some were drawn, and others were cut out of magazines). Add some twisted pieces of green tissue paper for the seaweed and job done.

We’ve had some really other great weeks, including ‘Spring’ and ‘Space’. But now it’s back to nursery for our munchkin. How have you found lockdown with kids?

Love, Lucy xx

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