Discovering Caves: A Cave Preschool Unit Theme

My daughter LOVE caves. We’ve gone on a couple of cave tours starting when she was a very young preschooler, and she’s loved them ever since. After our most recent cave tour, she asked me for a “Cave Discovery Box” to complete at home. So here’s a cave preschool unit theme, complete with book recommendations, math, science, geography, cultural, sensory, and pretend play activity ideas.

And be sure to scroll to the end for a free, downloadable choice board with all of the activities included.

Affiliate disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Anchor Text

In a Cave by Heather Ferranti Kinser

This book did a great job of capturing what it feels like to tour a cave.

The cover pages had illustrations of the supplies you need while exploring a cave like a flashlight, helmet, map, and compass. My little adventurer LOVED this and used this as a checklist to gather her own supplies when we made our own living room cave.

Each page has full color illustrations and the text rhymes, which we both loved.

I also loved how within a rhyming picture book the author tucked in great words like “calcite,” “stalactites,” and “crevice.” This paired great with our cave vocabulary word cards (more on that below). The book also touched on how caves are formed as well as provided illustrations of different rock formations.

We also really enjoyed how each page got darker as they descended deeper into the cave and then gradually became lighter page by page as they crawled back out.

And at the end of the book if you’re looking for more vocabulary, there’s a glossary.

This picture book offered SO MUCH and it’s available on Amazon here.

Additional Cave Books for Preschoolers

Caves by Nell Cross Beckerman

This is a great picture book that is easily modified for different ages. The main text rhymes and has a great cadence when read aloud. The illustrations are full page and full color.

For older learners, there’s additional facts on each page if you choose to add those in.

One thing I really loved about this book is that it mentions specific caves throughout the world and why they’re notable. This was a great tie-in to our geography activity.

It’s available on Amazon here.

Animals in My Yard: Bats

You can’t have a preschool cave unit without learning about bats!

I really love the Blastoff Beginner books for introducing nonfiction concepts to my daughter. The text is LARGE with only one or two sentences on each page, which is great for younger preschoolers. The pictures are full-color and full-page (and even my toddler likes flipping through them!)

This book emphasizes body parts of bats, how good their hearing is, where they live, how they behave, and what they eat. It also highlights key vocabulary words if you’re looking to bring more vocabulary into your preschool activities.

This is easily the best introduction to bats I’ve found so far.

Sophie Mouse: Journey to the Crystal Cave by Poppy Green

If you’ve read any of my posts before, you know we’re big Sophie Mouse fans over here. I also really love when I can tie in fiction into our preschool unit themes to help continue to foster a love for reading.

In Journey to the Crystal Cave, Sophie discovers a hidden cave that’s glowing. While investigating it further, she makes a bat friend and he teaches her all sorts of science about caves. It’s cute, fun, and my daughter loved reading it after we had been visiting Carter Caves State Park.

It’s available on Amazon here.

Language Activites

Cave Vocabulary Language Cards

Print off a set of cave vocabulary language cards (you can find the ones I created here), laminate them, and use them to not only teach your child cave-related vocabulary, but to also strengthen their reading and writing skills.

We used ours several different ways: At first I just let my daughter explore them as a way to introduce the words to her.

Next, I trimmed off the top of the card to see if she could match the word to the image. Along the way, I prompted her with hints like “what sound does this letter make?” (And a bonus- distinguishing between stalactites and stalagmites is a great way to get preschoolers to focus on the sounds middle letters make instead of just relying on the beginning letter sound to identify a word.)

Lastly, we used the cards to write a couple of sentences together. At first, I wrote out a sentence with a blank in it and asked her which vocabulary card would make the most sense in that blank. Next, we wrote a sentence together that used one of the vocabulary words. Lastly, she wrote her own sentence. We then put them all together and had a short little paragraph!

By physically placing the language cards in the blanks on the sentence it turned a writing activity into a fun, interactive and hands-on activity.

Family Activities

Create a Living Room Cave or a Box Cave

This is such a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon (or in our case when we did this activity- an afternoon that’s so hot all you want to do is think about being underground and away from the sun). Grab a giant box (ours came from Amazon’s Prime Day which was…convicting….)

Challenge your child to add in cave features. For our box cave, we lined the inside with black paper. Then we twisted together stalactites and stalagmites out of the brown paper that came with our Amazon delivery (really getting my money’s worth here out of that Amazon order) and taped them into the cave.

My daughter then was so excited that totally unprompted (I’m not kidding here), she grabbed some markers, drew some bats and then drew some cave paintings in her cave.

Still unprompted- she then gathered materials around the house that you would need to go spelunking, including the free hard hat she got from a Lowe’s build event, a compass, a flashlight, a backpack, and a map.

The box lived in our front office for weeks and at least once a day I would hear by four year old ask her little sister, “Hey! You want to go spelunking??!!” And off they’d crawl into the cave.

Or if you don’t have a giant box lying around, drape some blankets together over couches and chairs. It’s a classic that you can’t go wrong with.

You could also easily use a shoebox to create a much smaller cave!

Tour a Cave

There’s just no substitute for experiential learning. If you’re near a cave that offers tours, grab your hiking packs and venture out.

Science Activity

Learning About Bats

Bats are such cool animals. From their sonar hearing to the fact that they’re crucial pollinators- they’re just awesome.

Grab a great book about bats (I recommend Animals in My Backyard: Bats for preschoolers) and let your preschooler read up on them.

I also created this easy (and free!) worksheet on bats. (Pro tip- laminate it and let your child circle the correct answers in a dry erase marker- then you can use the worksheet again and again.)

And if you’re looking for even more bat activities, I found a great website here with a lot of different cute printables.

Geography ActivitY

Locating Famous Caves Around the World

I love geography and I love creating geography activities for my preschooler. This one might have been one of my favorites though. I made image cards of iconic caves around the world and then challenged her to place them on a large world map.

This was challenging as instead of just focusing on on one country or one continent, we were tackling the entire world. But it was so much fun.

While she found their locations, we talked about what made these caves special and unique. We also talked about which caves we would love to go visit and why.

I deliberately made this activity to match the caves found in the Nell Cross Beckerman book Caves mentioned earlier.

The cards I made are available here.

Art/Culture

Learning About Cave Paintings

Cave paintings are just cool and you can easily make this as informal or as formal of a lesson as you’d like. If you’re going for informal, show your preschooler a picture of some cave paintings (the ones found in France are fantastic examples) and answer any questions they may have. (You can also just show them the Lascaux card if you get the set of geography cards I made mentioned above.)

If you want a simple but more formal lesson, check out the easy (and free) worksheet I made here.

For an extra level of involvement, challenge your preschooler to create their own version of a cave painting. Either have them mimic the style of the Lascaux paintings OR have them create a painting that shows what is important to their daily life.

Math

Talking About Notable Caves by Size

Every notable cave has a different claim, right? “The deepest! The longest underground! The longest water system!”

Whatever it is, talk to your child as you read about these caves or look through the geography cards and discuss the difference between depth and length. Talk about different ways to measure things and different ways to track them.

Or, if you want to pick a few caves to compare their size overall, look up their size and then have your child rank the caves from smallest to largest.

This can be a great way to help your child practice sorting items by size and considering different ways to measure size.

Sensory/Fine Motor

Creating a Cave Diorama with Clay

Grab some modeling clay and have your preschooler sculpt a cave. To make it even more of a challenge, place the cave language cards mentioned above next to them and challenge them to include a stalactite, a stalagmite, and a column.

Additionally, you can have them add in toy figurines like bats into their cave.

It’s a fun way to let your preschooler use their hands and be creative while still reinforcing prior learning. (And if they want to really be creative, let them paint it once it dries!)

I hope there’s something here to help your little one explore caves while also working on critical educational skills!

And if you would like to download the choice board I created for my daughter to pick out her next activity, that PDF is available here: