Teaching Science – Sea Creatures

This spring semester for science, we studied sea creatures using Apologia’s Exploring Creation series. This is the 3rd book in this series we have used at cottage school, and it has been a helpful curriculum to use as we learn more about God’s creation! The Exploring Creation series has colorful pictures on each page related to what’s being taught.  It also has several hands on activities in each chapter meant to highlight and reinforce what was learned. Another plus is that the experiments use items that mostly can be found in your home. The lessons about sea creatures have been quite informative. (We moms have learned many things we didn’t know!) 

Living in a landlocked state, one might think we could do very little learning related to sea creatures, but we have been able to learn many things we didn’t know before, and we look forward to when a trip to the ocean is possible. In order to expand on what we read in each chapter, we have used many books from the library (before they closed–boo!), Magic School Bus shows related to ocean creatures (found on Netflix), and the Our Planet series, also found on Netflix.  

Home Science Tools (www.homesciencetools.com) has been a wonderful company from which to order dissection kits. Before we had to pause cottage school for social distancing, we were able to disect a frog and fish. This was a great hands on way to show the kids what they had learned through reading.  Whenever we are able to meet in person again, we plan on having a science day where we will dissect a sea star and crayfish. The children are also in the midst of making an ocean diorama that, when finished, will have sea creatures they have modeled out of oven baked clay. Some of the children have enjoyed looking at different sea animals in a book and then drawing them in a notebook along with copying various facts about that animal. 

The various ways we have been able to study the ocean and some of the animals that live there has been fun and has prepared all of us for whenever a trip to the ocean is possible. What fun it will be to explore a tide pool and see many of the sea creatures we have studied!