Shark Diet Game & Fun Facts about Sharks | Preschool Printable Game
Since Shark Week is coming up, we've been doing all sorts of shark themed games and activities--this shark diet game is one of our favorites!! And I'm including some fun facts about sharks in the post for you too!
I'm using this fun game to talk about energy in ecosystems with my older kids AND teach coin value to my younger ones...it's totally a math activity! Plus, using a die teaching subitizing skills, and playing a game gives kids a chance to practice taking turns and order of operations! There is SO much great stuff going on here!!
I'm making this a FREE PRESCHOOL PRINTABLE to celebrate Discovery's Shark Week! When it's over you can still use it in your Ocean Theme activities!
Scroll down for a link to download it!
And, here are a some of the topics I talked about with my kids:
Fun Facts About Sharks
* Sharks often live as long as humans!
* More than 100 million sharks are killed by people every year, most of them for their fins.
* Many shark species, including the great hammerhead and the whale shark, are actually endangered species.
* Shark nostrils are not used for breathing! They are only for smelling things!
* Some sharks can sense 1 drop of blood out of 10 billion drops of water (or about one drop of blood in an olympic-sized swimming pool).
Shark Diet
* Most sharks eat fish most of the time.
* Many sharks eat invertebrates like crabs and octopuses.
* Some very large sharks can eat seals and other marine mammals.
* The whale shark (the biggest shark on Earth) eats only plankton (the smallest food).
* Sharks that eat the smallest food (like plankton and little fish) must eat more food to get the energy they need.
* Sharks are considered apex predators because they are at the "top" of the food chain--most sharks don't have animals eating them.
We played this with all our kids (2-11 years old), and everybody loved it! It takes about 15 minutes for a group of 5 to play.
Here are the rules:
1- Start with all the playing pieces on START. (The playing pieces are sharks who eat their way around the ocean...except for the playing pieces that are fish because my 5-year old daughter insisted that we have some cute fish playing pieces.)
2- On your turn, roll a die, move the indicated numer of spaces, and collect the correct number of coins. If you roll a "6" you get two turns!
Coins represent energy obtained by eating the different sea animals on the board. Fish, shrimp, and plankton are all worth one cent. Crabs and octopuses are worth ten cents. Seals are worth 15 cents. You must have 20 cents to win.
3- To win, get to the END circle with 20 cents! If you don't have 20 cents when you get close to the end, take an extra loop to collect more. (The loop is not required if you already have 20 cents.) You most roll an exact number to land on the END circle.
I hope you love it!!
Some of our favorite Shark Activities are this science experiment to see how sharks float and playing memory with these shark cards!
You will also want to check out these fun Shark Activities on some of my friend's blogs (and my other blog!):
Shark Pre-Writing Practice
Feed the Shark Math Game
Feed the Shark Alphabet Game
Shark Craft - Cute & Easy
Free Shark Lapbook
Free Shark Emergent Reader
We also love the book How to Survive as a Shark (image is an Amazon affiliate link):
Happy Educating,
Carla
I may share at any of these parties!
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