It IS safe to go in the water with so many fun shark activities. Read on to get fantastic activities to keep your little shark lovers entertained and learning all week long!
WARNING: Be on the lookout for painful puns in this post. They might look dangerous, but they won’t hurt anyone.
Confession time. We LOVE Discovery Channel’s Shark Week #notsponsored. We fill up our DVR and clear the schedule to watch shark documentaries for one week a year. To be fair, we love sharks all year round. We love learning about them. We love all shark week activities. We love making shark snacks. We love swimming, like sharks. We just really, really like sharks.
Sink your teeth into some shark facts by checking out the Shark Week site all year long. You’ll always find good content to keep your family learning. We also learned a lot reading this book – Shark Bites
Shark Selfies
To get this week off the dock, we created silly shark selfie posters. We used 11×17″ cardstock and drew shark faces big enough to fit our heads inside their mouths. These made for great profile pictures to celebrate Shark Week!
Shark Games!
Take a bite out of boredom with this shark cup-and-ball game. Did you know that this type of game has entertained kids for centuries? Just like there are sharks all over the world, this game has different names around the globe. It’s called boliche in Spain, balero in most of central and south America, bilboquet in France, and kendama in Japan?! I love how Katrina made her shark bait a little squid.
Cutest, and Goofiest, Sharks Ever
Katrina discovered a brand new shark craft! She created adorable TP tube sharks with a cardboard tube, cardboard fins and tails and googly eyes. These fin-tastic friends can be customized with markers to match your imagination.
Mixing Sharks and STEM
Exploring the science side of sharks, all our afternoon STEM activities came from the Girls Can! Crate kit! The “Adventurous Ichthyologist crate” had a fun “Feed the Shark” game to learn what sharks eat, make your own gummy “cartilage-y” sharks, activities to explore the science behind how sharks float and more! We are a Girls Can Crate rep family – use code DAWN20 to get 20% off the first crate in any subscription (NOTE: the first crate only, not an entire subscription or individual crates).
Shark Art
After learning about sharks all week, we fell in love with the Wobbegong – watch this cool video – and I had to create one. We also make other silly shark buddies from polymer clay.
Our almost-craft-fail turned awesome-craft-win was making a shark calm down bottle. Our foam sharks just clustered at the top of the bottle. Katrina has the idea to fish them out and hot glue the shapes to the outside. Now the bottles are calming aquariums and turned out way cool.
Sweet End to Shark Week
When it was time to turn back to dock at the end of the week, we made easy-peasy shark cupcakes. The fins are broken Oreos! How brilliant is that? Katrina made vanilla ones, and I made lemon-blueberry ones in honor of lemon sharks (learn something about these cuties) and I added a little grenadine in mine to make it a bit chummy in the middle.
We hope you find an activity to sink your teeth into this week. Keep on swimming, learning and creating. But don’t try to outrun a shark. Seriously, they swim fast.
We almost forgot! We had a blast playing with this helium filled shark balloon all week. It was a great way to end the day.
Need more ideas? Swim over to this Shark Week Pinterest Board.
Download your daily activity inspo here
