Mister Seahorse Father's Day - Sparkling in Second Grade

I always feel bad for the dads of my students. Father’s Day falls at the END of my school year EVERY year. The time of the year when all chaos has broken loose and you are just trying to survive until summer. It’s ALWAYS the weekend right after we get out of school. Which means, we have WAY less motivation to do something for them than we do our mothers, who we celebrate a whole month before! But I’m here to share with you a quick, easy, and sweet way to celebrate fathers!

Have you read the story Mister Seahorse by Eric Carle (affiliate link)? Not only is this book so fun for ocean studies and author studies, it’s gorgeous pictures keep you coming back for more. To start our Father’s Day crafts, we first read Mister Seahorse because guess what? Seahorse dads take care of the babies before the are born!

As we read the story, we compared seahorse dads to our dads! We would stop and record on a circle map titled “dads”. They came up with the sweetest comparisons: “dads are kind”, “dads take care of us”, “dads work hard”, and “dads protect us”. Cue the waterworks. We also got to read from our Scholastic News, which was all about seahorses! After reading the story, we talked more about who dads are to us.

After this, I passed out these amazing Father’s Day Brochures from Aris at Sailing into Second. They are just the cutest! We were able to take our ideas and put them onto the brochures to tell our dads how much we loved them.

As the students worked on those, I snapped some pictures using Ashley from Teach Create Motivate‘s “I Love My Dad because…” printable. I LOVE sending these home for parents. The pictures always turn out so sweet and the kids so the silliest/kindest things! Pictures are always something parents can treasure forever.