Create Your Balance With Literacy

End of the Year: Ocean Thematic Unit

In May, I spend the last two weeks of school teaching my students about oceans and sea life. I do a thematic unit that covers reading, writing, math, poetry and science. In this unit students will be learning about different kinds of shells: Univalve and Bivalve, the terrain under the ocean, different sea creatures, the ocean zones, the ocean food chain and the water cycle. The students are engaged in craftivities, interactive journals for math, science and poetry, science investigations and expository writing. We have a blast learning about the ocean and at the end of the unit, we make an ocean in a jar. Here is a picture with materials and directions:

Ocean in a Jar

Isn't this cool! They are very easy to make and here's what you need: small mason jars- (one for each student), aquarium gravel, aquarium plants, plastic ocean animals, blue food coloring and jewels or sequence.

Each student fills their jar with gravel, a piece of the plant, an ocean animal and fill it with water. After filling it with water, add a drop of the blue food coloring. Then, screw the lid on and on top of the lid glue the sequence or jewels. This is a wonderful way to end your ocean unit so the students have something to take home and remember!

Another cool craftivity that we do for our ocean unit is called: Under the Sea. This is where the students color their ocean creatures and glue them onto a background. Then label whats at the bottom of the ocean. Here's a picture:

After we complete the craftivity, we write a story about the ocean and it's sea creatures. This story gets stapled to the craftivity.

Here is a picture of my theme center. It has posters of ocean animals, shells, coral, seastars, plastic whales and sharks, ocean books and more! The students LOVE the ocean center.

We also do a whale investigation and a shark investigation. I have these really cool plastic whales and sharks that I use for investigating different species.
Here are the whales:

Here are the sharks:

So here's how I set this up: Before we do the investigation for both I read a whale story and a shark story. This really gets the students excited about what they are getting ready to do!

Then, I set up stations around the classroom with the whales. I also have labels that go with each one. The students use their clipboards, pencils and whale templates to rotate around the room and illustrate the whales and label them. This will take about 20 minutes. When they are finished, they will color their whales and then cut out their template and glue it into their science notebook or journal.

On the second day, I do the exact same thing, just with the sharks. The students LOVE this investigation! Here are the templates that I use for the whales and sharks:

I also like to make these lapbooks for researching sharks, whales, seahorses, and seashells! All of the research templates get stapled inside the lapbook.