Marine Biome Unit

This has been a busy month with several different biome studies back to back. So far we have studied the Rainforest, Tundra, Grasslands, and Desert biomes. Time to move on to the Marine biome!

For this unit I again hit up ducksters.com for the ground work information and then made up some simple fact sheets for the girls notebooks. This weeks unit had lots of possible hands on activities so we went with it.

 We started with covering what the four main Marine biomes are and drawing picture to represent them.

 We made diagrams of the three levels of the ocean and did research in our library copy of the National Geographic Animal Encyclopedia to discover which animals lived in each layer.

Then we did the same with the lake ecosystems.

 Our books for this unit included What If There Were No Sea Otters, Dark Day In The Deep Sea, and Dark Day In The Deep Sea Fact Tracker.

We learned about vertebrates and invertebrates while working on making paper jellyfish.

And the little kids got in on the action by completing a fish bowl craft for their notebooks.

We of course could not study the Marine biome without a trip to our local aquarium to see and touch some real marine animals!

The kids favorite part of the unit I am sure was the trip to the beach! Not really educational however the aquarium was right on the beach and there was no chance we were going to walk by the ocean and not stop by to play in the water.

Total for this unit was about $4 for craft supplies thanks to library books and a gifted trip to the aquarium.

If you are doing a study of the Marine biome I would love to hear about it!