Theme Day: Beach or Water Day

Theme days are a fun way to break up the regular routine or celebrate the last week of school.  My goal was to create thematic outdoor stations that had novel activities and kept student engaged.  Here is the breakdown of my beach/water theme day.  Kids love water.  I wanted to offer the sensory experience of water without a lot of water waste, or complicated hose hook ups or water balloons (time consuming and leave a bunch of garbage) and wet clothes.  For our beach day, kids were encouraged to dress in beachy or tropical clothes but knew that we wouldn't be swimming or running through sprinklers (not an option at my site).  Here are the simple activities we did have.

I used 2 big plastic tubs and loaded them with bath toys, containers, basters and droppers.  I expected the kids to spread out but they mostly stuck together and created their own stories with the sea creatures as the characters.  This confirmed my belief that kids benefit from dramatic play.

This was the easiest station to set up!  Each child was given a cup of water and an old paint brush and were given the entire building or sidewalk to paint with water.  No refills though.

The kids were able to observe evaporation up close and stayed engaged.  Some worked on collective painting and others chose to work on their own.  The shadows in the picture add an extra element of "cool".

Each child was given a frozen ice pop as a snack (shown on the back of the picture).  In the future, I will try to have the kids make them the day before and get a first hand experience with reversible change through freezing and melting.  This year, freezer space was not available.  I put out National Geographic Kids magazines for the reading stations.  Kids who had never chosen one of these for their book box were completely engaged in the informational text style!

I am learning more about cooperative games as a way of teaching SEL and taking the edge off winning and loosing every time games are played.  Pictured here is a game called The Sneaky Snacky Squirrel. I changed the rules a bit so that the sneaky squirrel give someone else a nut rather than stealing a nut.

Another favorite cooperative game is Hoot Owl, Hoot.  The players have to work together to get all the owlets to their nest before the sun rises.  Both games are available at Target.