Teaching young children about the importance of the coral reef in our planet’s ecosystem is an important first step to developing environmental consciousness. By providing your little one with the opportunity to construct their own coral reefs, they are learning about how these living structures function and thrive.

As your child creates their individual reef, they are formulating combinations of how shapes fit together. Open-ended play such as this also prompts them to group like objects together, an important precursor to more complicated mathematical concepts.

For this activity, students created their own coral reefs out of skewers, colored pasta, and flower foam. They practiced sliding the pasta onto the skewers, until their reefs contained many different colors. They finished with adding their sea creatures and participating in open-ended play with their friends.