Hi Everyone! This program is called Playing with STEM. It is a STEM program for 2-5 year olds. It is primarily play, because at that age, I just want to make science, technology, engineering and math fun!
In this program we learned about ocean animals. There were stations all around the room that the kids visit with their parents. Each station had a sign to give some instructions and a fun fact. Here are the ocean animal stations:
Deep Under the Ocean
The children learned about the different layers of the ocean. How they vary with the amount of light and the animals that live there.
Dolphin Toss
The children could toss rings to the dolphins to catch.
Ocean Counting
The children did counting by using a resource from TPT JK Special Education. We modified the pages to add a flap. They chose between the answer then lifted the flap to find the answer.
Ocean Sensory Play
The children could play with the animals, shells and colored rice in these sensory bins.
Reef Building
The children built a reef using these cool toys. The toy can be found at Amazon.
Turtle Hatching
For the active station, the kids found turtles (3D printed from a file on Thingiverse) in the nest. They took them across the room to the ocean. We always have an active station since movement is important for preschoolers. The turtle program can be found at Thingiverse.
Touch Tidepool
In this activity, the children could touch the animals in a small pool. We put a small amount of water in the pool, then added shells, sea stars and sea cucumbers (from the dollar store). The sea stars can be found on Amazon.
Ocean Sticker Pictures
The children designed underwater scenes using the stickers. They are found at Oriental Trading.
Ocean Animal Masks
We made ocean animal masks so the kids could pretend to be animals, especially during our freeze dance time. They are found at Oriental Trading.
Cubetto Underwater Voyage
Cubetto is a robot great for teaching beginning coding. The children add arrows to the control board to move the robot around the ocean mat. For more information on Cubetto, go to https://www.primotoys.com/
Freeze Dance
We have added freeze dance to many of our PWS programs. It helps to teach kids to follow directions. For this program, we danced to Under the Sea and Baby Shark.
Ocean Playdough
The children made ocean animals with blue homemade playdough. They use cookie cutters and rolling pins with ocean textures.
Ocean Puzzles
The children could solve puzzles about ocean animals. We had several large floor puzzles and smaller jigsaw puzzles.
iPad Ocean Game
The children learned about ocean animals with the Coral Reef Ocean Game.
This program was one of our most popular and fun Playing with STEM.
If you have any questions or want to use some of my resources, leave a comment.
Fun for Children at the Library 
This looks incredible! Thank you so much for sharing! This is definitely going to be a theme for me this summer. Do you know how much you spent on everything? I’ve been doing this a year and am struggling with the money/ budget aspect and trying to decide if it’s a me problem… This blog is so inspiring. I’m so grateful for people like you that share their amazing ideas.
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Thank you so much! I love teaching science to little kids! I try to get a lot of things from our collection, other libraries, garage sales and second hand stores. I would say the themes I do depend on what I can get for low or no cost. For ocean animals, I bought the starfish for about $14. It was about $30 for the crafts from Oriental Trading, but you could make a craft cheaper if you need to. The reef toy was $28, but maybe if you have games in your collection, you can ask that selector to get it for games and use it when you need to. So I spent about $72 for 52 attendees, but I am going to reuse everything but the crafts for storytime.
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