Our Ocean Portal Educators’ Corner provides you with activities, lessons and educational resources to bring the ocean to life for your students. We have collected top resources from our collaborators to provide you with teacher-tested, ocean science materials for your classroom. We hope these resources, along with the rich experience of the Ocean Portal, will help you inspire the next generation of ocean stewards.
Featured Lesson Plans
Keeping Watch on Coral Reefs
Students learn why coral reefs are important, and what can be done to protect them from major threats.
Long Live the Sharks and Rays
Students will learn about adaptations that have helped sharks and rays survive. Students will explore similarities and differences between sharks, rays and other fish and that different types of sharks and rays have different temperaments and diets and that some of the largest sharks and rays are the most gentle.
Focus on Farmer Fish
In this two part lesson, students gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between environmental factors and organism adaptations through a focused study on a specific coral reef denizen—the personable farmerfish. Students first take part in an interactive PowerPoint presentation to gain background knowledge and then apply learned concepts by participating in a board game.
Search Lesson Plans
Find lessons/activities by topic, title or grade levels. Sort by newest or alphabetically. Lessons were developed by ocean science and education organizations like NOAA, COSEE, and NMEA to help you bring the ocean to your classroom.
Grade Level
Lesson Subject
Microbes and Climate
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Microbes and the Marine Food Web
Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative
Microscopic Hitchhiking
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Modeling the Gulf of Mexico
CSOMIO
This middle school science curriculum contains five lesson plans related to ocean modeling, including the fields of biogeochemistry, fluid dynamics, and microbiology.
Mutualism and Coral Reefs
Moorea Coral Reef LTER Education
This lesson is created to stress the idea of interrelationships among organisms and how this can effect the surrounding environment. This lesson also goes step by step through the scientific approach to developing and implementing a scientific research study. Students are expected to write their own ideas about the best way to investigate the scientific questions provided, and compare their ideas to those of the actual researcher.
Ocean Primary Production
NOAA Ocean Explorer
This group of lesson plans focuses on primary production in the ocean via photosynthesizers, like plankton and algae. Students will learn what factors limit primary productivity in the ocean and about other ways ocean organisms produce energy (i.e. chemosynthesis).
Oil Spill Cleanup Challenge
ECOGIG
The goal of this activity is to get students thinking about oil in the ocean, and in particular about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the challenging cleanup efforts. Each pair of students will have a water-filled tray to represent the Gulf of Mexico and a set of materials to respond to the simulated oil spill.
This activity is useful for a wide range of ages and works well in a camp or classroom setting. This challenge, including introduction, hands-on activity, and discussion, takes about 1 hour.
Prince William's Oily Mess - A Tale of Recovery
NOAA Ocean Service Education
How does an ecosystem recover from a major one-time insult such as an oil spill? As you will learn from this Discovery Story, the answer is not simple. It isn't easy to determine whether a particular area of shoreline has recovered from oil during a spill, or how to expect it to look when it has.
Shark!
Sea World Education
Students explore the natural history of sharks and recognize that humans are an interconnected part of sharks’ ecosystems.
The Adventures of Zack and Molly Learning Guide
ECOGIG
The Adventures of Zack and Molly is a new, four-part video series about an unlikely duo exploring the deep ocean produced by ECOGIG in collaboration with Sherman's Lagoon creator and filmmaker Jim Toomey.
The Learning Guide provides discussion points, connections to Next Generation Science Standards, hands-on activities, and further resources. Spanish version available here.