Teaching about oceans can float a whole raft of creative lesson ideas. From transforming your classroom into a submarine or getting students to create fish and chips displays with marine-friendly messages, the vast expanse of the seas can be explored in many ways.
Where before the key stage 1 to 3 geography curriculum was fairly land locked, teachers are now expected to develop their students’ knowledge of globally significant places “both terrestrial and marine”.
So if you’re looking for ways to bring the world of the deep to life, here’s a collection of lesson ideas to help you. Don’t forget Monday 8 June marks World Oceans Day – the perfect excuse to dive in.
The classroom submarine
When Ben Culverhouse, then a year 5 teacher at The Manor Church of England primary school in South Gloucestershire, wanted to get children excited about ocean wonders he turned his classroom into a submarine.
The idea came to him after seeing the play Kursk, set on board a British attack submarine. Culverhouse got in touch with the show’s director who emailed him submarine digital sound effects. “I set up a sub interior control room as my whiteboard screensaver and used a red light bulb for silent operations such as reading,” says Culverhouse.
As the eight-week project developed, the children made models of underwater creatures including papier-mache pufferfish, and hung them around the classroom.
“We used the submarine to ‘travel’ to a certain point in the ocean each lesson,” says Culverhouse. “For example, in one class we went to the Mariana Trench to look at deep-sea life forms which we then wrote about. I asked children to explain why the underwater creatures had huge eyes and strange appearances.”
For geography, Culverhouse explored the locations of the oceans and continents around the world. He also gave a lesson on navigation, plotting a course using marker buoys and compass directions, to introduce maths skills.
The class even studied Robert Louis Stevenson’s seafaring classic Treasure Island for their literature unit in the submarine classroom. They wrote character studies of the narrator Jim Hawkins and the villainous Long John Silver, as well as their own sea-based adventure stories.
Using oceans to ease transition
Leah Sharp taught the topic of oceans to her year 6 class at Downsbrook middle school in West Sussex by working with a year 10 group at Patcham high school in Brighton.
Sharp was teaching her younger pupils physical geography, while David Rogers at Patcham was tackling various types of coastal erosion and flooding with his GCSE class.
After exchanging tweets about what their students were working on, they decided to team up using Google hangouts.
The project lasted six weeks. At the start of every week, each side would send over new resources to be uploaded onto hangouts. The contents would depend on what students had been learning in class, ranging from presentations about rivers to games about coral reefs.
“They shared work using hangouts, but mainly the platform was a way to put faces to names and meet who they were creating work for,” says Sharp.
For example, younger students made games about various ocean-related topics. One activity required the user to answer questions about coral habitats, exploring how to stop water levels getting too low. The older students played the games and provided feedback on how they worked, informing the younger children about whether all the information was correct.
This not only helped the older students with revision, but the process of explaining and adapting their work for the younger students helped them develop a deeper understanding of the topic, says Sharp.
Moreover, the project has been a great way to ease transition anxiety. “The year 10 and year 6 students have been able to get to know each other over Google hangout, and this has helped the younger students realise that making the move to secondary school isn’t that scary,” says Sharp.
You are what you eat project
Alan Parkinson, geography teacher at King’s Ely in Cambridgeshire, taught oceans as part of a year 7 unit. He introduced the “you are what you eat” project to teach about food issues and sustainable resourcing.
Students were introduced to the various methods used to catch fish and their effect on the environment. They constructed models of trawlers with string to visualise the impact on the sea floor, and investigated more sustainable alternatives, such as farming fish like sea bass and tilapia.
Using paper plates and cardboard cut-outs, the children made fish and chips dishes with messages written on them. Each fish explained why it was threatened, whether by overfishing or pollution, while the chips were labelled with ideas for helping the fish to survive, such as introducing no-catch zones.
Students were then asked to create an eco-friendly menu. They had to select three meals and, using their new knowledge, ensure each delicacy was sustainable, for example, using locally sourced ingredients and avoiding overfished species such as cod and haddock. They linked up with the food technology department, and some groups were allowed to cook their dishes.
The key idea of the unit is to show how human activity effects the environment. The unit also helps students develop their inquiry skills, using digital mapping to source and locate suppliers of fish.
Parkinson says the variety of different activities involved in this project went down well with students. “From making the menus, the students started to see how decisions we make on a daily basis have an impact on other people and other places. It helped them appreciate the understanding of sustainability, and explore ideas like seasonality, animal welfare and food miles.”
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Source:Three creative ways teachers can explore oceans in the classroom