Children can take a piece of the beach home with miniature beach craft activities. Collect sand and shells from the beach and add several spoonfuls of sand to a clean, empty glass jar. Mix blue food coloring with water and fill the jar a little over halfway with the water. Add the shells, then top off the jar almost all the way with vegetable oil before sealing the lid with a hot glue gun. Turn the jar on its side and rock it to create waves in the "ocean."
For another project, paint the inside of a shoe box with blue paint to represent the ocean. Cover one side in glue and add sand. Allow it to dry before shaking off any excess. If you prefer, fill one-third of the box with sand and allow the students to comb and rake through it to find small shells and create patterns. Decorate the remainder of the box with beach-themed stickers.
Play a game of spot-it at the beach. List four or five items that children should spot, such as someone building a sandcastle, a person with a bucket, a piece of driftwood or a bottle of sunblock. The first person to spy all of the items gets to think of a new list for the other players to spot.
Make observational activities more hands-on by providing a list of items for children to find in a beach scavenger hunt. Give children a bucket and challenge them to find several different types of shells or seaweed, or a specific and hard-to-find item such as a pebble with a hole in it. In addition to the specified items, tell the children to find a surprise item of their choice.
Provide a selection of beach-themed worksheets and activities in the classroom. A basic literacy worksheet for kindergartners might ask the children to put beach-themed words in alphabetical order, and a worksheet to teach one-to-one concepts in math could involve cutting and pasting a specific number of shell pictures onto a worksheet shaped like a bucket.
Help kindergartners complete a beach-themed activity book. Each page of the book would contain a sentence for the children to complete, such as "I bring..." and "I eat..." Children also can illustrate each page of the book to correspond to the completed sentence.
Practice the alphabet by challenging students to write giant letters in the sand with their feet or a spade. Kids can team up to write basic sight words.
Sharpen kindergartners' addition skills with a game of seaside darts. Draw several circles inside each other in the sand. Assign a points value to each circle -- the smallest circle should be worth the most points. Children take turns throwing a shell "dart" at the circle, and keep score with a tally chart in the sand.