Fascinating creatures (technically fish rather than horses – as you may have guessed!) these funny looking things have eyes that move independently, no stomach, suck shrimp up their snout and are the only creature where the males carry the young full term (that’s right, egg from mum gets given to dad and he does the rest!)

As always, I did a little research before introducing the topic, but instead of dictating the facts you fine, instead hold back and ask what the kids know about seahorses. Mine told me they live in the seaweed, dance together and are lots of different colours… So we got colouring. (This amazing artwork by English designer Rachel Russell is great for a little advanced colouring).

Seahorse by English designer Rachel Russell.

As we coloured we talked about more things we knew about Seahorses, and my fact finding mission came in handy. If we came across a question we didn’t know we found the answer together – because learning how to learn is more important than the facts they are learning.

Then we stuck our coloured seahorse in our animal frame and filled in our creature questions.

We later headed to the beach and created a giant seahorse out of sand, to the museum where we found a preserved seahorse, and built a seahorse sculpture out of paper, balloons and lots of PVA glue – I’ll detail these things in future posts, but for now enjoy colouring and investigating the seahorse with your future young marine biologist.

(This is a good point to load up on a few very brief and easy facts before you start.)