Teaching Ideas for an Oceans Day

Whether you’re celebrating World Oceans Day (which takes place on 8th June every year), or you’re having an ‘Oceans’ topic with your class, try some of these teaching ideas and classroom activities!

English:

• Read a book set in the sea. Write your own version of the story. We have a wide selection of books on our site, complete with activity ideas, such as Somebody Swallowed Stanley or Where the Sea Meets the Sky.
• Choose a poem from the Children’s Poetry Archive Under the Sea Collection and use it as a model for your own poems.
• Generate a list of vocabulary that can be used to describe the ocean.
• Find an ocean news story, such as one of these, and write your own news report about it. Our Recount Writing Pack includes useful planners for writing recounts.
• Write a playscript based on a day at the seaside. Our Play Scripts Pack includes checklists and templates to support this activity.

• Compose a series of social media posts about an exciting underwater discovery.
• Write a job description for a marine biologist. This post has lots of useful information.
• Use hotseating to explore the life of a sea creature or a character from an ocean-themed book. The teacher takes on the role of the character and answers questions from the class.
• Watch The Oceanmaker, set in a world where the oceans have dried up. Try one of our linked teaching ideas. Imagine a world where the oceans have dried up.
• Use our Under the Sea Image Pack for display or as a discussion starter.
• Make a collection of sea and ocean-themed books.
• Download an enormous collection of resources in our Oceans Pack. It has a topic guide, a glossary, vocabulary labels, posters, a game, and much more!
• Create a poster warning about pollution in the oceans and giving advice on how we can help prevent it. This page is a great resource for this activity.
• Try one of our teaching ideas linked to the short films Bottle and Flotsam.

Maths:

• Use toy sea creatures or cut out pictures for counting and sorting.
• Provide shells and beads to create repeated patterns.
• Draw fish to show fractions of numbers – for example, can you draw 8 fish in 2 equal groups?
• Try an ocean-themed maths worksheet. There are lots on this Kidzone page.
• Use squared paper to create symmetrical fish and other sea creatures. This page is a good starting point.
• Go outside and measure out the length of sea creatures, then draw them on the playground.
• Use a tide calendar and plot the high and low tides for a location on a tidal chart. This type of chart plots time on the X-axis and the height of the tide on the Y-Axis (scroll down the location’s page for an example).

Science:

• Download an enormous collection of resources in our Oceans Pack. It has a topic guide, a glossary, vocabulary labels, posters, a game, and much more

• Learn about oceans in the water cycle using our Water Cycle Pack.
• Try this simple experiment to explore the density of salt and fresh water.
• Build simple food chains featuring ocean plants and animals. Our Food Chains Pack includes some useful resources.
• Try this investigation to answer the question “Can the ocean freeze?”.
• Frugal Fun 4 Boys has a super collection of ocean experiments.
• Our Adaptations Display Pack has some useful posters, including the common octopus and the anglerfish, which make a great starter when talking about adaptations.
• Demonstrate the effect of heat on ocean currents.
• Write a report about the importance of sea grass to the environment. This BBC Bitesize Guide has all the information.
• The WWF has a fantastic unit about plastic pollution in the oceans.
• Visit the Marine Conservation Society Teaching Resources page to find lots of ready-to-use resources.
• Ocean Explorer is a great resource for finding out more about the ocean.

Computing:

• Use block-based coding (such as Scratch) to create an animation showing the movement of waves.
• Prepare a slide presentation with interesting ocean facts. This National Geographic Kids page has some interesting ones to get started with!
• Take a virtual tour of an aquarium; Monterey Bay has some fantastic web cams to explore.
• Explore the Smithsonian Ocean Site, which is packed with useful information and resources.

Design Technology:

• Build a boat from recycled materials and test to see if it floats.
• Try folding some origami sea creatures.
• Design an ocean-themed jigsaw puzzle. These printable templates are useful.

Art:

• Create an image inspired by The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
• Make a collage using recycled magazines, newspapers, and paper to form an ocean scene.
• Use clay to make sea creatures, like this octopus:

• Combine materials (paper, fabric, natural objects) to form a 3D ocean diorama. This one is a great example, showing the different ocean zones.
• Follow this tutorial to draw a sea turtle:

• Create an ocean scene using oil pastels.

Music:

• Learn and sing some simple ocean songs, like A Sailor Went to Sea, Sea, Sea and 1,2,3,4,5, Once I caught a fish alive.
• Use percussion instruments (like drums) to mimic the sound of rolling waves.
• Use a digital composing tool, such as Garage Band, to compose a piece of music about the ocean.
• Experiment with water xylophones to explore the different sounds water can create.
• Listen to some music inspired by the ocean, such as Sea Sketches by Grace Williams.

• Watch a short excerpt of a video of waves. Mute the sound and compose your own.

• Learn some sea shanties.

Geography:

• Find the world’s major oceans on a map and identify the continents that border them.
• Locate and label significant ocean currents on a map.
• Learn about island nations that are threatened by rising sea levels with this scheme of work from the European Space Agency.
• Find out about how sea ice is affected by climate change.

History:

• Research and share tales of early explorers who sailed the vast oceans. MAYBE do we have something in the explorers pack? Our Explorer’s Pack has resources to teach about marine explorers such as Abel Tasman and Jacques Cousteau.
• Create a timeline of maritime exploration milestones.
• The Royal Museums Greenwich has a huge archive of resources such as these about the Cutty Sark.
• Our Titanic Pack is full of interesting resources about the disaster.
• Research and write a report about how sailing vessels changed over the years. This page has some good information.
• Find out how the Vikings navigated on this useful page.

Physical Education:

• Design and set up an ocean-themed obstacle course with activities such as walking the plank (using a balance beam) and retrieving an object from a container of water. This BBC resource has three sessions of dance based on classical music inspired by the sea.
• If the weather is warm enough, set up some water-based games outside, such as throwing wet sponges at a target or playing catch with a water balloon.
• Try playing “Shark Tag”, where the player who is on is a shark and the other players are fish.

Religious Education:

• Listen to the Hindu story of the Churning of the Ocean.

• Read the story of the parting of the Red Sea from the book of Exodus.

Languages:

• Learn and practice ocean-related vocabulary in the language you are learning.
• Label images of sea creatures in your native language and the one you are learning.
• Role play going to the beach in the language you are learning.

PSHE:

• Have a class discussion about caring for the ocean. Why is it important? What can we do to help?
• Look at these slides about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Discuss how we can help.
• Look at an image of a stormy ocean, then a calm one. Discuss how the two images make us feel. How can oceans affect our emotions? Can we use images and ideas from the ocean to talk about how we feel?