Sea Turtle Sensory Tray

(Open ended play)

We watched a documentary about sea turtle today and then sum it up using this sensory tray.

From National Geographic: Adult green turtles breed by the beaches where they were born. After mating in the shallow waters offshore, the female crawls onto the sandy beach, digs out a nest with her flippers and lays a clutch of about 115 eggs. She then covers the eggs with sand and returns to the sea. After about two months, the babies will use a special “egg tooth” to break their shells and hatch from their eggs. But when they do, the race is on, and they must immediately make a treacherous journey across the sand to the water, avoiding predators along the way!

As a diver myself, I’ve seen the real sea turtle as huge as 5 feet tall swimming freely by the reef wall. I was also once a volunteer in a turtle conservation. It has been a dream come true to share this tray with my daughter. With a toddler we never quite sure what would happen though. I wasn’t sure if she grasped the whole story when we watched the documentary together.

We used: sterilized beach sands, origami (for turtles, eggs and hatched egg), and spiraled paper strips (representing sea waves).

She did however understand it!

She removed the hatched egg out of the tray (maybe she didn’t see a correlation of what is this thing even doing here?), made a queue of turtles towards the sea while tried to bury the eggs as the mummy turtle did in the documentary and eventually helped those turtles to swim into the ocean.

It was more like a pretend play where she talked to herself or to me (just a bit, here and there), or to those turtles. She kept on repeating the words: “egg,” “turtle,” “sand,” “ocean,” and “mummy” (referring to the turtles mum). She also did numbering to accompany her movements.

She played so very long with the sands. That part of burying the eggs took forever. She also preferred to bury them closer to her side of this tray. Slowly but surely she made sure all those turtles could find safety towards the open sea though.

“Bye-bye baby,” she said.

I never thought a two and a half years old could interact this way! Indeed, kids are brilliant if we let them shine.

#sea #turtle #origami #sensory #tray #toddler