Montessori Inspired Layers of the Ocean for Preschoolers

Vito is 40 months old.

Moving on to learning about the ocean for Earth Day, I’ve set up this activity tray to demonstrate to the boys that the ocean has many layers and that it is mostly represented by the darkness and lightness of the color blue. In the set-up, the layers are represented by the bottles, from the layer where there is sunlight to the part where there’s none at all.  We are using the book About the Ocean by Cathryn Sill to help us explore the different animals in the ocean.  Since this activity is intended for Vito (but Mavi was also participating), I didn’t focus much on the names of each layer since he can’t read yet, our activity was more on introducing the concept and for familiarity.

Once the bottle activity was done, we worked on recreating the ocean in a cardstock with shades of blue paint.  Here you can see, Vito and I were painting our “ocean”.  My work is on the left, I was showing him how to make the layers but he just decided to make his ocean by mixing the colors.

We use our Montessori color tablet set 3 as our guide.  I showed Vito the blue set and discussed how we can use it to represent the layers of the ocean.

Finally, when all our painted ocean dried up, we used it in our sorting activity.  We didn’t get to use his work because Mavi cut it out and used it in his own “ocean” activity LOL.  Anyways, we just used my work and I gave Vito some ocean animal figures.  We placed them in the ocean layers as we work our way through the book.

He saw a stingray and the sea turtle so he immediately looked for our Schleich collection and placed them on the ocean layers too!

And here’s our final work!  The ocean absolutely looked gorgeous with all the colors of the animal figures.  Mavi was actually impressed! Imagine how much more the ocean would look in real life!

Follow us on Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, Instagram or Twitter for updates!  More learning materials at Pinay Homeschooler Shop.

Pin this for later!