Oceans

Manna Moment

​Genesis 1:9- “And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.  And it was so.  God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.  And God saw that it was good.”  When we gather things, we usually gather them with a purpose to put them in order amidst the chaos.  The imagery of God ‘gathering’ the waters in order to place them where they should go is an intentional and purposeful design.  He controls the waters and even controls the tides telling the oceans how far they can come on shore.  I am so thankful to be able to trust a Creator God who intentionally orders our lives with good things.

Where are the oceans?

Let us jump into the oceans to review the names and locations of the five oceans of Earth.  I had the students jump to the bigger oceans but when it came to the Indian, I just had them stick their toe in:)

​Here is a Regions of the World Map to help review the seven continents and five oceans.

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Ocean Trivia and Treasure Hunt

Typically, I read aloud a book to give the students content information and have conversation about our learning objectives, however, today, our book had more trivia questions which I turned into a treasure hunt.  None of the students asked for a 'treasure' so our treasure was the knowledge gained from studying these ocean trivia questions.

There are 15 questions and answers that I used and placed an answer and question on each card.  They are numbered.  The number 1 question is actually on the bottom of number 15's answer.  So the student would read the question, see if they already know it (activating prior knowledge) and then go find the matching number from the question and read it aloud.  They would then read the next question and someone else would go find the answer.

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One of the trivia questions in the book told us about how a storm had come and knocked a crate of bathtub toys out into the ocean.  This taught the scientists that the oceans were connected and how the ocean moves.  I was displaying the picture of the gyres, pronounced 'ji-er' to show what the scientists had observed.

Layers of the Ocean

There are 5 ocean zones that I am aware of and each of them has a common name and a more scientific name.  I chose to focus on the first three ocean zones; Sunlit, Twilight and Midnight zones while keeping their names common.  As students cycle through learning more about the ocean, they can learn their scientific names.  On the Ocean Biome sheet, I did include the scientific name so they are aware of it but for our learning purposes, we used the common names.

I set up my agility ladder to have three spaces and labeled each space with the ocean zone.  I then demonstrated that as they hopped through they were to recite the name of that ocean zone they were jumping through.

Thank you Summer Lange for these great photos.  If you need professional photos done she does a beautiful job.  She helps me out each week during class and happens to be a photographer...God is so good!!!

After we learned the layers/zones of the ocean, we then filled them with animals from our biome sheet.

And then we worked on our Biome Sheet

This Biome Sheet is designed that each of the animals have a dotted line that matches the zone or layer that this animal is known to enjoy the most.  Included with this Biome sheet are the names of each animal and the zone that they frequent.

He did it!! I just assigned this for homework yesterday.  Great Job!!