Pattern Block Printables for Ocean Animals

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Do your kids love ocean animals? These pattern block printables for ocean animals will be a hit in your classroom! I love pattern block activities because they encourage students to look for patterns, work with shapes, and use fine motor skills to make the picture with blocks.

Pattern blocks can be purchased on Amazon or an education store like Lakeshore Learning.

Pattern Blocks

Pattern blocks teach children about shapes and is a tool for developing visual discrimination skills. Visual discrimination skills is being able to see differences between objects or pictures, even subtle differences. For the ocean animal printables I’m sharing today, students will need to determine which of these 6 shapes they will use to fill in the template.

square
hexagon
trapezoid
parallelogram
triangle
rhombus

Pattern Block Ocean Animals

This printable include pattern block templates for the following ocean animals:

shark
seal
dolphin
jellyfish
crab
seahorse
shirmp
octopus
whale
fish
jellyfish
lobster

For the activity, give the student one of the ocean animal pictures and some pattern blocks. See if they can fill it in with the shapes! It looks so colorful when it’s filled in!

You may also see that students choose a different shape to fill in the animal. In the lobster picture below, you’ll see that I used yellow hexagons instead of two red trapezoids.

Pattern block activities are wonderful for working on fine motor skills. If this is too difficult for the child to do or the child gets frustrated with the pieces moving, you can tape the paper to a white board and use magnetic pattern blocks to fill in the template.

When a student completes the page, have them count how many of each shape they used.

More Tips

For students who aren’t sure where to begin with this activity or you notice having trouble filling in the ocean animal the correct way, try giving students the number of blocks they need for the picture and instruct them to use all of the blocks to complete the picture.

And for students who find this activity too easy, try hiding the design and see if they can create the animal without the picture!