Welcome to our “Learn & Play – Animal Activities” series. In this series, we picked a few favorite animals and built a day of learning fun filled with activities to study each animal. For this day, we focused on oh-so-adorable Turtles! We watched a few videos, read some books, wrote some creative stories, had fun with crafts, and played some games. Read on to check out the fun!
We hope this article helps your little ones find the JOY in learning! If you’re looking for more ideas on turtles, check out ours here. Also, if you’re looking for more activities to inspire kids to love learning, please feel free to check out our other At Home Camps!
A TYPICAL DAY
All kids are different and you can definitely vary your day with whatever works for you 🙂 But the gist of our day having our kiddos focus on some work books or online learning tools in the early morning, an intro to the day’s theme after they were done, some videos around lunch time, and themed activities (reading time, writing time, crafts, food crafts/snacks, and games or experiments) in the afternoon. Feel free to pick and choose whatever works for you 🙂
WHAT TO WATCH
We looked through a few options for our video of the day but opted to pull up the Turtles in the United States site by birdwatchinghq.com. This site has quite a bit of information on it – detailing 34 different types of turtles in the United States along with maps showing where they live and brief videos on each one. We let the kids look through and pick a handful of videos they wanted to watch after reading through the descriptions 🙂
If you’re looking for a video with a bit more entertainment, Wild Kratts: Season 2, Episode 15: Tortuga Tune Up is all about sea turtles!.
There are also several zoos and organizations that have posted some videos on their animals – turtles included!
- Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum: Meet Pancake the Turtle. This is a cute, short video of a spiny softshell turtle.
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
Snack time may be fun but PLAYING (preparing) your food can be just as fun. For this one, we made some green jello and put them into mini cups. Then we cut out some small turtle bodies and placed them underneath – “instant” turtle jello 🙂
READING
Reading is not just an important part of learning, it can also be fun if you pick the right books and theme! For this day, we picked two books. If your kids have been reading for a bit, they may be able to read National Geographics Kids – Sea Turtles (Level 2). It focuses only on sea turtles, so if you’re looking for a more general one, there’s also a Level 1 book just on turtles. We also had an Ocean Animals for Kids book that has a collection of pages for different ocean animals – this one is great if you’re planning multiple days on different ocean animals. There’s a page or two on the different types of species. Since both are non-fiction, once the kids were done reading, we had them recap a few things they learned 🙂
WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS
Just like reading, writing helps prevent that summer slide by both encouraging their creativity but also their motor skills and penmanship.
If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme: TURTLE, SHELL, etc..
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.
- If you could be any type of turtle, which one would it be and why?
EDUCATIONAL FUN
For this one, we thought we’d give the kids a bit of fun while exercising their memory. We created a basic turtle outline (though you could easily find more complex ones online). Then we used the outline to cut out some turtle shapes on green construction paper. Using pairs of a few images of their favorite types of turtles, we glued them to the other side. Then we laid them out (image side down) and had them find the pairs.
For our younger ones, we simply had numbers and shapes for them to play with – it was a great way to get them excited about finding numbers and shapes 🙂
CRAFTS
We followed a craft from frugalfun4boys.com: Adorable Egg Carton Turtle Craft that we’ve done for a few other at home camps. It’s quite simple with just a handful of supplies, but you can always be creative and substitute materials. For this one, we used construction paper for the legs instead of pipe cleaners 🙂
If you’re looking for a slightly cleaner craft (no glue), you could pick up a set of Sea Life Pop Beads – we’ve used this set for one of our Ocean Parties – Ocean-Themed Party. There’s a handful of different sea creatures, but there are definitely some turtles in there 🙂
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for checking out our learning fun with turtles article! If you enjoyed this article, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest
If you’re looking for more turtle ideas, check them out here! Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other learning fun days!
Happy Learning!
