A booklet providing simple but interesting facts about seahorses -- such as that they don't have teeth, use their tails to hold onto grasses and change colors like chameleons -- serves as a lasting reminder of what the children have learned. Including a sentence on each page, with space above for the student to color a picture, stimulates students' imaginations and allows them to use fine motor skills to hold a crayon. Reading the book aloud to the children, pointing to each word as you read it, gives preschoolers an understanding of reading from left to right, an important step in developing reading readiness.
Holding a paintbrush also helps preschoolers develop fine motor skills. To do tissue paper art, each student will need a sheet of paper with a printed or drawn outline of a seahorse. The teacher then gives them one-inch squares of colored tissue paper, which they can crumple up into balls. Using a small paintbrush, the children apply white glue to the area inside the border of the seahorse drawing, then press the piece of tissue paper onto the glued surfaced. The children can use as many pieces of tissue paper as they like to fill in the area inside the seahorse outline.
An ocean-themed obstacle course can reinforce concepts such as over, under, around, in, out and through, as well as offer a chance to practice gross motor skills. The course requires a large, open space containing items such as a balance beam, hoops, limbo sticks and cones. One example of an obstacle course sequence involves stepping over coral (balance beam), going under a rock formation (limbo stick), around other fish (cones), jumping in a sand hole (hoop) and finally going through seaweed (green crepe paper hanging down from a second limbo stick). The children they must stay upright like a seahorse when completing the obstacle course, so the teacher must set the limbo sticks high enough to enable them to do so.
Different styles of music -- such as Handel's "Water Music" or Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons," jazz by Louis Armstrong or rhythmic African music -- can serve as a soundtrack for seahorse movement. In deciding what they think the music sounds like, such as happy or sad, fast or slow, preschoolers use language to express feelings conveyed by music. Encouraged by the teacher, the children imagine how a seahorse would move in the ocean, and use a length of ribbon approximately 3 feet long attached to an empty key ring to simulate the movement of the water.