Categories Inspiration, Literacy, Math

Beach Day Ideas For Kindergarten

Who doesn’t love going to the beach? And if you’re like us and live in a landlocked state, you must bring the beach to your classroom! Check out these beach day ideas for kindergarten!

Beach Day Ideas For Kindergarten: Beach Transformation

The first thing we do is set the scene with a beach transformation. Ya’ll, this is SIMPLE. I bought a blue tarp and brown painter’s cloth from Walmart for about $5. I bought a beach umbrella, beach chair, and some shovels and buckets from Five Below for about $20. Add a beach ball and pool noodle and create a fun beach scene! My students read at the beach during the last week of school!

beach day ideas for kindergarten classroom transformation

Here’s another way you can set the stage! Inflatable palm tree, grass skirt, beachballs, and a picture on your smartboard. Add in some beach music and ocean sounds, and it’s a simple way to turn the classroom into a beach getaway! (The palm trees get used for our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom week and our luau transformation!)

beach day ideas for kindergarten set the stage to engage

Beach Day Ideas For Kindergarten: Beach Counting

One of our favorite math activities is counting with seasonal or thematic paper plates. We found these beach plates at Dollar Tree. We wrote numbers up to 20 on the plates. Students use real sea shells to count and make the ten frames! (The ten-frame recording sheet is on our FREEBIES page!)

beach day ideas for kindergarten counting games

We also found these shell plates at Dollar Tree and use them for counting!

Beach Day Ideas For Kindergarten: The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Shell

The perfect book for your beach day or beach theme is The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Shell. We use our Read It Up! creation to work on literacy skills, grammar, graphing, and writing after reading the story!

Beach Day Activities: Sight Words

As the end of the year approaches, we focus on sight words so we can end the year strong! Some of our favorite, engaging beach activities mean practicing sight words!

We use our Sunny Sight Words and Sea Shell Sight Word projects to assess and practice our sight words! These projects are fun and really keep the kids engaged and focused during the chaotic days of the end of the school year! These activities are editable so you can add in any words (or other skills) and they are aligned with the science of reading because the focus is on decoding the words and automaticity!

Another fun sight word game is our Sight Words At The Beach! Students can read, match, build and write sight words! We use our ESGI data to assess students and focus our beach sight words on our most missed words! Again, these are aligned to SOR because we’re decoding the words, mapping the sounds and writing the words!

Grab your Sight Words At The Beach here:

Beach Day Ideas For Kindergarten: Beach Balls

Another fun and easy and CHEAP way to bring the beach into your classroom is with beach balls! You can grab them for ONE DOLLAR at Wal-Mart and Dollar Tree. Use a Sharpie and you can write on them to practice any skill. We use them for sight words, phonics, addition, subtraction, letters, sounds, and numbers up to 100!