Use dollar store craft foam to make these fun beach shape window clings. This is a great activity for imaginative preschool play when you need a quiet day at home. Just turn on the Beach Boys (or some soothing ocean sounds), and picture your family in a tropical paradise.
Foam sheets can be purchased in a variety of sizes and colors. They even come sparkly! For this simple activity, go ahead and buy them at the dollar store if you can. But if a visit to the dollar store isn’t feasible, or you don’t know which foam sheets I’m talking about, you can purchase them on Amazon here.
Craft foam sheets are so easy to use: You can draw your shapes on them with pen or pencil, they cut easily, and they stick to smooth surfaces when wet! Perfect for an easy window cling!
Since I wanted my girls to make a beach scene, I used blue to cut out some waves, green for some palm trees, and various other colors for fish, starfish, beach umbrellas, and surfboards. I cut out some simple people, then made interchangeable bathing suits for them (like paper dolls – but foam!). I added some shark fins, a sailboat, and a crab. Finally, I cut out some simple geometric shapes (squares, rectangles, triangles, circles) for building sand castles.
Set up the activity in front of a large window, like a slider, with a shallow dish of water and a towel for catching spills. Then instruct your child to dip the beach shapes into the water and stick them to the glass.
My 4- and 5-year-olds began enacting their own dramatic scenes right away, even reviewing beach safety rules with any prompting from me.
4-year-old: “Mom, can I go swimming?”
5-year-old: “Yes, but you need to put on sunblock first!”
Later…
5-year-old, with a stern voice: “Why are you not wearing a bathing suit!?”
They used the shapes in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Two triangles became a diamond-shaped kite stuck in a palm tree. Other triangles became flippers. The crab got his own swim trunks. And the squares were beach towels for the fish.
My 2-year-old joined after nap time. She turned the circles into swim goggles and made the people play a game of “catch the starfish”.
Your preschoolers can use these beach shapes for fun, imaginative play – or you can review geometric shapes to sneak in some math. What happens when you combine two squares? Which shape can you make with two triangles? What is it called when you slice a circle in half?
If you made these beach shapes for your little ones, what cute scenes did they enact? Tell me in the comments below!