Welcome to our “Prehistoric Sea Creature Week” – an at home camp filled with days of relaxed learning and fun activities all themed to stunning (and sometimes terrifying) prehistoric sea creatures! For our first day, we introduced what a prehistoric sea creature is, learned about their differences to dinosaurs, and picked a handful of creatures to dive deeper into!
Like most of our at home camp weeks, we kicked off the week by easing into the topic. We started off with setting up the camp area with some decorations! And, like all days, we added in some interesting books and some writing / storytelling prompts to keep them learning! Read on to check out the fun!
INTRO
Almost every child knows that dinosaurs roamed the earth many, many years ago. BUT what they might not know is that every creature from that time period is not actually a dinosaur! Enter other prehistoric creatures like the pterosaurs (flying reptiles), dimetrodons (prehistoric creatures with a large scale on their back), and the stars of our camp week – sea creatures (like mosasaurs, megalodons, and plesiosaurs)!
Now, if your little one thinks every prehistoric creature is a dinosaur, defining one would be a great place to start. The Natural History Museum has a great article, What is a Dinosaur, that defines a dinosaur and a dinosaur’s characteristics. Then moving on to some prehistoric creatures that aren’t dinosaurs is a great next step. If they’re still unsure or need some extra convincing, comparing and contrasting characteristics would be a great next step.
These are some great articles that highlight some awesome prehistoric sea creatures:
- 7 Prehistoric Creatures that aren’t Dinosaurs by Mental Floss
- Sea Monsters Education by National Geographic
- Lists 10 Incredible Prehistoric Sea Creatures Worth Exploring by Ocean Info
Once they’ve gotten the concept of what a prehistoric sea creature is, then it’s off to setting up the camp area – always a fun activity – and reading, writing, crafting, and experiments!
DECORATE THE CAMP AREA
Decorating the ‘Camp Area’ or the room / area of your house where you’ll have most of your activities is a great way to get the kids excited about the theme of the week! If they’re incredibly crafty and creative, having some extra and opened-ended crafts would be great to keep them engaged. Otherwise, a prepared activity would work well!
If you’ve got any prehistoric sea creatures filling up your kid’s room, then bring them out to ‘enjoy’ prehistoric sea week! (And if you’re not being too picky, dinosaurs or other modern day similar creatures can come enjoy the fun too).
For our camp area, we decorated the space with an Ocean Backdrop, similar to what we did for our Exploration of the Ocean – Shark Day. The concept is pretty simple – take some blue tissue paper and create an ‘ocean’ on an empty wall. Then add some prehistoric sea creatures that the kids have either drawn by hand or colored in.
These pages have quite a few free printable coloring pages:
- Prehistoric Animals by www.supercoloring.com
- Color Giant Mosasaur, Color Plesiosaur, and Color Archelon by www.education.com
- Sea Animals Coloring Page by www.iheartdinosaurs.com
WEEKLONG PROJECT
In addition to introducing the topic of the week, we try to give the kids a week-long project to help reinforce what they learn throughout the day. For this week, we used a similar (and successful) project from our Mythical Creature Week – a field journal to track the creatures they study throughout the week.
Rather than just having them draw and describe each prehistoric sea creature, we also had them compare and contrast each prehistoric creature with their possible modern day counterparts.
WHAT TO WATCH
We find that mixing in a short video themed to our day is a great way to add some learning fun! We try to pick informative videos OR mix in a cartoon favorite (where they don’t even realize they’re learning). Here are some of the videos we picked from for the day:
- Sea Monsters Of The Past by SciShow Kids (6m)
- Top 20 Prehistoric Sea Creatures by WatchMojo (16m)
- Sea Monsters a Prehistoric Adventure by Prehistoric Documentary (40m)
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
What’s more fun than taking a break and having a simple snack??? Including the snack in your theme of the day! We find that our kiddos are more than happy to eat the snacks they create especially when they can arrange them into fun shapes and scenes!
For our snack of the day, we picked from a simple favorite – pretzel fossils. The prehistoric creatures that we picked for the week no longer exist today, and so one of the ways we can study them is by observing the fossils they left behind. The challenge of the day was to set up the ‘pretzels’ (or fossils) in a way that resembled one of the prehistoric creatures!
READING
It’s no secret that reading is an important part of learning, which is why we pick out a handful of books that are fun and filled with some learning tidbits. For our older ones, we have them fill out some worksheets (or let them create some of their own comics) to describe what they read and/or learned! These are a few we picked from for the day:
- Prehistoric Sea Beasts (If Extinct Beasts Came to Life) by Matthew Rake. This is a great book for elementary age children with fun facts and pictures!
- Smithsonian Kids Prehistoric Deep Sea by Marfe Ferguson Delano. This is a great book for elementary age children with fun facts and pictures!
- Ancient Sea Reptiles: Plesiosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs, and More by Darren Naish. There’s quite a great deal of really nice information in this one, but it’s definitely more for older or advanced readers.
WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS
Just like reading, writing is a great way to keep kids learning by both encouraging their creativity and thought process as well as helping them practice their motor skills and penmanship.
If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme: PREHISTORIC, SEA CREATURE, FOSSIL
If you’ve got older children, have them write a sentence or two up to a page or two (depending on their age). Encourage them to be creative AND give reasons for why they made certain choices. This was our writing prompt of the day but definitely pick something your kiddo might be interested in writing about!
- If you could be any prehistoric sea creature, which one would it be and why?
- If you could travel back through time and befriend any prehistoric sea creature, which one would it be and why? What questions would you ask?
- If you woke up one day to find that a prehistoric sea creature had somehow made its way to your nearby ocean, which one would you like it to be? Why?
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for checking out our at home learning fun article! If you enjoyed this post, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest
Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other Prehistoric Sea Creature or Ocean Learning Fun Ideas, as well as our DIY At Home Camps!
Happy Learning!
