Curated OER
Marine Ecosystems
Students identify producers and consumers and construct a food chain from four marine ecosystems. They describe the delicate balance among organisms in each environment. In groups, students discuss the human activities that upset the...
NOAA
Understanding Food Chains and Food Webs
Jump into an exploration of marine ecosystems with the first lesson in this four-part series. After first learning about crustaceans, mollusks, and other forms of sea life, young marine biologists view a PowerPoint presentation that...
Curated OER
Marine Food Web
Students investigate the effects of the food chain on all animals by creating a food web. In this seafood lesson, students discuss energy flow and research a specific marine organism of their choice. Students create a food web in their...
Curated OER
What Lives in Water?
Students learn about a variety of sea creatures. They look at sea creatures pictures and identify the creatures by name and by their unique characteristics. Phonemic Awareness skills are reinforced using the beginning sounds of the...
NOAA
An Ocean of Energy
Young biologists trace the path of the sun's energy through marine ecosystems in the second part of this four-lesson series. Building on prior knowledge about producers, consumers, and decomposers students are introduced to the concept...
NOAA
Seafood and Human Health
Whether your young biologists realize it or not, humans play a significant role in marine ecosystems. To help them understand this fact children first create graphical representations that show homo sapiens' place in marine food chains,...
Curated OER
Ocean Life Food Web
Students construct a food web representative of the Gulf of California. They use pictures to depict all of the organisms in the appropriate level of the web (producer, primary consumer, etc.)
Curated OER
Sea Connections
Students, after locating different marine habitats on a globe, play a card game about ecosystems, food webs and organisms.
Curated OER
Sea Connections: Marine Ecosystems
Students identify producers and consumers from marine ecosystems and describe the balance among them in the environments. After constructing a food chain from a marine ecosystem, they examine human activities that can upset the balance...
Polar Trec
Arctic Smorgasbord!
Two blooms of phytoplankton, instead of just one, now occur in the Arctic due to declining sea ice, which will have widespread effects on the marine life and climate. In small groups, participants build an Arctic food web with given...
NOAA
Deep-Sea Ecosystems – Life is Weird!
A pool of brine in the deep sea can be up to four times as salty as the surrounding sea water. The deep sea ecosystem relies on chemosynthesis and the organisms that live there are often strange to us. The lesson focuses on researching...
Virginia Department of Education
Freshwater Food Chains
What's in the water? Encourage your class to further explore this question and learn about pond ecosystems, food chains, and food webs as they complete this hands-on activity. They view the environment from a new perspective after...
NOAA
Importance of Deep-Sea Ecosystems – Chemists with No Backbones
Marine invertebrates offer us many new options for developing pharmaceutical drugs, such as w-conotoxin MVIIA, which is extracted from the cone snail and is a potent painkiller. The lesson encourages scholars to research various types of...
Curated OER
Plankton / Phytoplankton
Students discuss the importance of plankton in the ocean ecosystem. In this biology lesson, students identify the different types plankton by observing them under the microscope. They explain how plankton population affect global climate.
Curated OER
The Good, the Bad and the Nasty Tasting
Students examine the effect of chemicals from marine plants or animals on predator's preferences. In this ecology lesson, students conduct taste tests and collect necessary data. They write their conclusion after analyzing experimental...
Curated OER
Oyster Gardens - No Soil Required!
Explore the practice of oyster gardening. Because oysters play a vital role in marine ecosystems and their populations have declined, biologists are transplanting oyster seed to repopulate reefs. After learning about this practice,...
Curated OER
Secrets of the Ocean Realm - Survival in the Sea
Students determine the sequential links in a marine food chain and identify the roles that various organisms play in this chain. Students develop charts as visual aids for illustrating marine food chains.
Curated OER
Marine Food Webs
Students examine how food webs illustrate the ways in which organisms depend on each other for energy and nutrients, and make food webs showing the feeding relationships among organisms encountered in the Gal??pagos coastal waters.
University of California
Plankton
Plankton: so much more than just a SpongeBob character. Three different activities have kids looking at both phytoplankton and zooplankton in pictures, as well as collecting their own samples (depending on your access to a saltwater...
Curated OER
Iron Fertilization - Pumping Iron
The theory that adding iron to ocean water may increase phytoplankton ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is examined. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute is monitoring conditions off the California coast to...
EduGAINs
Go Eco! Ecosystems
How is a movie theater like a desert biome? Compare systems to ecosystems with a set of activities that focuses on accessing multiple intelligences and building upon knowledge. As learners discuss the ways elements of an ecosystem depend...
Curated OER
Sea Turtles and Nesting Behavior
Students explore the nesting behavior used by sea turtles and explain how these behaviors are beneficial in the survival of a species. They discuss the advantages and disadvantages that sea turtles have be mass nesting. They identify...
Curated OER
Lessons: Food Web
Students use an interactive web-based food web game to gain familiarity with tropic levels and interactions. They already understand that in an ecosystem there are four basic tropic levels: producers, primary consumers, secondary...
Curated OER
The Ancient Mediterranean: Trade, Contact, and Cultural Diffusion
Ninth graders begin the lesson by being introduced to the basic terms of economics. In groups, they discover how they are affected by trade because of the clothes they wear and foods they eat. Using primary sources, they examine the...