Hooray, it’s summer time at last! What I’d really like to do is go to the beach but I’ve still got a few more lessons to teach. So I thought I’d bring the beach to the classroom and do a series of lessons about the ocean and the seaside. This is the first one. It’s a Sea Animals EFL ESL lesson plan for preschool kids from about 3 to 6 years old and will last about one hour. In this lesson, your children will learn about the different animals they might see at the beach or in the ocean. They will also make a very cute octopus to take home with them. We’ll talk about colors, counting and what the different animals do. So grab your towel and a snorkel as we’re off to the beach!
For this Sea Animals EFL ESL Lesson plan, you will need:
- Colored card
- Scissors
- Glue or sticky tape or a stapler
- Coloring markers and stickers or googly eyes for decorations
- Snorkel and mask if you’ve got them but if not, it’s fine
Sea Animals songs and videos:
- Let’s go to the Beach by Maple Leaf Learning
- A Sailor went to Sea by Super Simple Songs
- The Animals in the Ocean by The Kiboomers
- The Octopus Song by Maple Leaf Learning
Introduction: Meet the Sea Animals
After your Hello routine, tell the children that we’re going to the beach. If you have a mask and a snorkel, get them out and show them how you use them and practice swimming together. How do you move? Do you know how to swim? What can you see? Start introducing the different animals that you will see while you’re in the sea. You could do this by drawing them on the board, showing them pictures on flashcards, or showing them in a book.
Sing a song about sea creatures
You could choose any of the songs in the list above to learn to sing about the different sea animals. I like to start with A Sailor went to Sea as it gives a good list of different animals that you can use to talk about. As you learn the song, talk about what the animals look like. What color are they? Do they have legs? How many? Do they have a tail? Don’t forget to do lots of TPR and use a different action for each animal.
Play a sea animals game
Pretend to be one of the animals but don’t tell the children what you are. Say ” Who am I” and do actions so they can guess. To answer, they have to say “You are a …..”. Then let the kids take turns doing it. Don’t forget to make them use full sentences. If you think they could do something more difficult, instead of doing actions, ask them to describe which animal they are: “I have four legs, I’m orange, I snap” so the others can guess. Then sing The Animals in the Sea song to practice all the animals again.
Learn about the Octopus
Now we’re going to look more closely at the octopus. See if you can find some pictures or videos of an octopus and talk about it with the kids. Count its legs, how many are there? How many legs do the children have? What color is it? Does it walk or swim? Where does it live? Introduce as much vocabulary as you feel they can cope with. Then practice asking questions in pairs. How many legs do you have? Where do you live? What do you eat? Then sing the Octopus Song.
Practical Activity: Let’s make an Octopus
This is a really easy activity even for small children. You’ll need to cut out an octopus body shape from the colored card for each child. Just a circle or an oval is fine, quite big so they’ve got plenty of room to decorate it. I used A4 sized card and used one sheet for each octopus. Now get the kids to decorate it with a face and whatever colors they want to use. I gave my class plastic googly eyes to stick on which looked really good. While they’re doing this (or before the class if you’re more organized than me), cut more A4 card into long strips about 2cm wide. You’ll need at least 4 strips per child for the legs. Obviously it should really have 8 legs but you might not have space to attach 8 of them.
Once they’ve finished decorating the octopus, give the kids the strips of card and show them how to fold them like a fan, first in one direction and then in the other. When they have folded all the legs, attach them to each octopus with tape or glue or staples. The legs should be bouncy. After everyone has finished, sing the Octopus Song again and make each octopus dance to the song with you. Then get the kids to introduce their Octopus and describe it to the class.
Conclusion:
If you’ve got time, sing the songs about sea creatures again to make sure they remember all the animals. Then do your Goodbye routine and give each child his or her octopus to take home.
We had real fun doing this EFL ESL Sea Animals lesson plan so I hope you do too with your class. Don’t forget to let me know in the comments if you have any ideas about how this lesson could be adapted or used in different ways. If you’ve enjoyed this lesson plan and want to see some more, you can find all my lesson plans here. To stay up to date with new lesson plans and teaching ideas, you can follow the GoogooEnglish Facebook page. Alternatively, sign up for email updates below.