Free Homeschool Unit Studies:
Ocean Creatures

Our free homeschool unit studies bring water and ocean creatures together to make an irresistible combination for any kids aged 5-7 – so long as you don't mind the bathroom getting wet!

Take your kids to meet ocean creatures with homeschool unit studies. Free lesson plans, coloring pages, experiments and an ocean diorama.

* Free lesson plans for all ages.

* Free Action Pack with printable sea creatures you can color in.

Like all our free homeschool unit studies, you will actually cover a whole range of learning 'targets.'

Depending on where your child's interest take you, you'll cover science, geography, art and craft and reading - all in one go!

Teaching children is easy when you get them on your side. We love this ocean creatures project.

This is a great project to combine with making an Ocean Diorama.

The free Action Pack has coloring pages of sea creatures which you can color in and add to your ocean unit studies, as well as beautiful photos of sea creatures.

You can get your free Action Pack on this page and use it to make a wonderful Ocean Scene.

So, where do you start?

With your child, of course! You have to go where your child's interest is and adapt this ocean creatures homeschool Unit Study to them.

First, we took the largest sheet of poster cardstock we could buy. BIG is always best with small children. Wallpaper lining paper would be great.

As you can see, we've painted the waves on the card and then got messy sticking our fingers in paint to make white fingerprint 'wave crests.'

We've used crinkly shredded paper to make homeschooling seaweed and cut out a big blue whale which the children have drawn on.

How about going down to the beach – there's lots of free homeschooling stuff just waiting on the tide line to be collected!

Make A Jellyfish

Natascha and her 5-year-old children had a great idea. How about starting your Ocean Unit with a Jellyfish?

"We made jellyfish using half a paper plate, pipe cleaners (chenille stems), and beads stuck on the plate."

~ Natascha, Courageous Homeschooling Facebook group

Natascha's family also made a coral reef using different coloured homemade playdough.

"We also used oceans to look at food chains and what happens if their is a decrease of something due to environmental issues.  The result was that when we went on vacation a few weeks later they insisted that I swam into the sea to collect floating plastic. They also picked up any rubbish they saw on the beach!" ~ Natascha

Ocean Creatures

Sequins make great eyes for an octopus:

Or you could put them on fish and add some flower shapes and gold barring for scales:

You'll see from my affordable homeschooling advice, there is one area I don't think you should skimp on. Top quality craft materials are a must for homeschool unit studies or any other projects you work on, like our model solar system.

Ocean creatures look good in felt too! Here's a hammerhead shark:

Homeschooling Unit Studies Activities

Free Lesson Plans

The Smithsonian Education Ocean Portal is a fantastic learning resource which you can use to back up your homeschool Unit Studies.

You'll find:

• Lesson Plans, including an introduction to Coral Reefs (grades 3-5, 6-8)
• An Activity Book
• More complex issues for older kids like a lesson where students investigate the relationship between the size of the wave and depth to which the effects of its energy can be observed.  (Grades 6-8 covering Earth Science and Physical Science)

• National Geographic is also great for all ages.  Find great facts, photos and videos of ocean creatures from the bottlenose dolphin to sharks and emperor penguins.
• It also has a photo gallery of the Pacific with facts on the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. 
• It has activities like making your own waves and the Earth's water cycle.  Highly recommended.

You can also follow sharks in real time on the Ocearch tracker which is a great idea.

Free Ocean Lesson Plans Middle & High School

The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation is a non-profit set up to help preserve, protect and restore the world’s ocean.

You will find:

• Free Ocean unit lesson plans mostly aimed at middle and high school students covering coral reefs and mangroves, including virtual reality field trips
  
• Ocean Odyssey takes viewers on an underwater journey from the Great Barrier Reef to Antarctica, following a whale mother and calf on their 1,500-mile migration. It incudes lessons for elementary (grades 2-5) with topics about humpback whales and ocean creatures.

FREE PDF Middle School Ocean Lesson Plans

• Middle school lesson plans with cards like the one above to cut out and stick on teaching ocean food webs and food chains.

 Get your free Ocean Odyssey PDF download here.

Fantastic Ocean Facts

This wonderful animation helps bring your homeschool Unit Studies alive with fascinating ocean facts:

• The oceans harbor 99% of all living space on Earth
• The oceans have enough water to fill a bathtub that is 685 miles long on each side
• Scientists think there are 1,000s of undiscovered species living in the deep
  

Enjoy!

Layers Of The Ocean In A Jar

See The Creatures Of The Deep

This lovely interactive page let's you scroll down to see all the creatures in the Ocean.

Octonauts

Great fun and learning at Octonauts corner.

You can also watch Octonauts on the BBC.

Help Save Ocean Creatures

If you want a fantastic way to inspire your kids to start this homeschooling unit study, watch this true home video of the rescue of a humpback whale from fishing nets. It's so amazing; the whale even comes back to say thanks!

Art And Craft

Kids love drawing! What a shame so many of them get put off by school…

• Ocean Creatures stencils are fun.
• How to Draw Sharks and other Sea Creatures helped us with outline shapes.
• You can get stamps of ocean creatures to use with ink stamp pads and leave impressions of killer whales, dolphins and seals all over the place!
• Pasta shapes, red lentils and kidney beans make an unusual free shark collage.

• There are some fabulous ocean craft activities on this page.
  
• Origami is fun. Here's my son's underwater diver:

• And here's how to make an origami sting ray:

• Watching David Attenborough's The Blue Planet got us fascinated with ocean creatures like Anglerfish and how they attract their prey.

Set Up An Aquarium

Setting up an aquarium can be a huge excitement - and a great addition to your homeschool Unit Studies.

If you are thinking of doing the same, Simone can help you make sure you don't make a mistake I wouldn't have thought of:

Virtual Oceans

I couldn't resist adding some virtual exhibits!  Here are:

• The whale bones exhibit from the Smithsonian...click on the arrows and it's like you are seeing round the lab. Exciting!
• Virtual tours of lots more exhibits including marine ecosystems at the Smithsonian - some way beyond the scope of this Unit to tempt you!

Science Experiments

What an ideal way to add water into the equation and learn all sorts of free homeschooling science!

• You can fill your bath full of ocean creatures and play the game: Does it float or does it sink? ("Properties of materials" for those who do teacher-speak homeschool unit studies).

• If you squeeze the bubbles out of a sponge, you'll be able to work out why 'floaters' sink too.
• You can make metal ships out of tin foil, divide the inside into cargo holds with bits of cardboard and work out how load effects which end sinks first. (Physics for free as part of homeschool unit studies.)

Field Trips

This is a must activity to get the most out of your homeschooling unit studies.

• The London Aquarium left us with memories of glass catfish, a sleeping leopard shark and feeding manta rays.
• We met Bruce, the black-tipped reef shark, on a homeschooling trip to a Sea Life Sanctuary.

• Monterey Bay Aquarium in California may be a little far away for some of us, but since it has live web cams of sea creatures including sea otters it's a great way to have a peek in the deep for free!

Ocean Crafts

If you've got a child who likes making models, you've got an ideal way of adding design and technology to your ocean creatures homeschooling unit studies.

• We used K-Nex to make a 94cm shark.
• We made a free homeschooling submersible out of a cereal packet body with cardboard egg box lights and a vegetable net fish-catcher.

More Homeschool Unit Studies

Try out some more brilliant free unit studies with this Homeschool Science: Rainforest for Kids Activities.

And come and join in with our human body activities here.

So I hope you can see that ocean creatures make an ideal free homeschool unit studies project, with your child learning all sorts of things and having fun at the same time.

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