Ocean Unit

As the end of another school year creeps upon us, I know a lot of us teachers like to go out with a bang. My team decided to finish the month of May with an "Under the Sea" unit. We would teach our students all about different sea creatures, as well as creative writing about the beach and a small section on Pirates for the final week. After doing a lot of research on what I wanted to teach, visiting my public library to check out almost 50 different sea life books, I set to planning my lessons.

Now I am a teacher who cannot stand reading long lessons that others have written. Instead I work best with photos, so I have documented my lessons in photos with descriptions. Enjoy!

Graphing our favorite whales.

Writing about coral reefs on the back of paper plates. 

The fronts contain colored pictures of different coral and fish.

Close up of the coral reef writing.

Graphing our favorite coral reef animals.

Writing about sea turtles

Our sea turtle writing was stapled to the back of paper plate turtles with a shell pattern. Even got the kids to understand that turtles travel through the ocean by currents (thank you Finding Nemo), so we hung them from the ceiling in a mesh net to symbolize the EAC, East Australian Current.

 

Writing about Killer Whales.

Display of student made books.

Jellyfish with facts inside them.

Our giant killer whale with facts written on the back.


One activity I really wanted to do with my kids is teaching them about personification. I found a great ocean-themed book at the library to help with this lesson. It's called "The House Takes a Vacation". Summary: A family packs up their car and leaves for a vacation, so their house decides to go on vacation too, to the beach. I read the book to my students and we discussed what they noticed the house doing that seemed real or something that humans did. Then we made a circle map all about where we would have our house go on vacation. The students picked their topic and wrote about it, then drew their house in that location. Finally I gave each student a speech bubble for them to allow their house to say something about their vacation.

One really great project we did was to write about what we would do if we got to have a vacation by the sea. We voted and I took photos of the kids in 3 different scenarios that they would then paste into their books. Below is how the book turned out.