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.
How Diverse is That?
NOAA Ocean Explorer
Students discuss the meaning of biological diversity. Students will compare and contrast the concepts of “variety” and “relative abundance” as they relate to biological diversity. Students calculate the appropriate numeric indicator that describes biological diversity of communities given the abundance and distribution data of species in two communities.
It’s Not Just the Core that Tells the Hole Story
Deep Earth Academy/Consotrium for Ocean leadership
Students read about “down-hole logging” technology, in which instruments are lowered from the drilling ship into the hole after cores have been removed to measure physical properties that reveal more about sea floor sediments and rocks. They then examine sample logs to note patterns and interpret the data.
Just Jelly: ecological role of gelatinous zooplankton
NOAA
In this activity, students will be able to compare and contrast the feeding strategies of at least three different types of gelatinous zooplankton, and explain why gelatinous zooplankton may function at several trophic levels within a marine food web. Given information on the vertical distribution of temperature in a water column, students will be able to make inferences about potential influences on the distribution of planktonic species in the water column.
Keep it Complex
NOAA Ocean Explorer
Students describe the significance of complexity in benthic habitats to organisms that live in these habitats. Students describe at least three attributes of benthic habitats that can increase the physical complexity of these habitats. Students provide examples of organisms that increase the structural complexity of their communities. Students infer and explain relationships between species diversity and habitat complexity in benthic communities.
Keeping Watch on Coral Reefs
NOAA Ocean Service
Students learn why coral reefs are important, and what can be done to protect them from major threats.
Learning Ocean Science Through Ocean Exploration
NOAA Ocean Explorer
A curriculum for teachers of Grades 6-12 that takes lesson plans that were developed for NOAA Voyages of Discovery and the Ocean Explorer Web Site and presents them in a comprehensive scope and sequence through subject area categories that cut across individual expeditions.
Light at the Bottom of the Deep Dark Ocean
NOAA Ocean Explorer
Students will be able to list the various adaptations that enable deep-sea fishes to survive; explain how bioluminescence helps deep-sea fish respond to food predator and reproductive pressures in their environments; explore how the structure of an appendage helps determine and utilize its function; describe how deepwater organisms respond to their dark environment.
Molecular Explorations
NOAA Ocean Service
Students will be able to explain and carry out a simple process for separating DNA from tissue samples and complex mixtures. Students will also be able to explain the process of restriction enzyme analysis.
Net Results
WETA/PBS Marine Fisheries and Aquaculture Series
Students will study and replicate a model of the factors affecting fisheries populations in the Chesapeake Bay (or any other bay). Through a game they will investigate how decisions by watermen, recreational fisherpeople, and lawmakers influence and are influenced by economics and the abundance or scarcity of fish and shellfish stocks.
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).