OceanQuest 2000
Fun Ocean Activities

Discover the Wonderful Ocean  

Were you able to choose an animal that you would like to learn more about?  I found a few great ones that really need our help.  I was looking at the Harbor Porpoises, Harbor Seals, Lobsters, Sea Otters, Sea Turtles, Sharks, Swordfish, and Whales.  Did you find another animal that you would like to explore and learn more about?  I think that all the animals are great so I'll let you and your group choose which animal we can study further.

Choose an animal that relies on the ocean to explore and learn more about. 

Once we pick our animal we will need to:

1. Draw a detailed illustration that shows our animal in action. We need to include details to show where it lives (habitat.) In the picture we need to show some of the other plants and animals live there.
   

2. We will need to scan your illustration so that you can e-mail it to OceanQuest. We need to send our picture as an e-mail attachment to mdurant16@iwebquest.com. 
   

3. I have heard that OceanQuest does not want us to  include our real names for safety reasons.  They suggest that we make up an alias, made up name, that has something to do with the ocean.  They want us to put down our grade level.  They provided a great site about keeping safe on the Internet.  You might want to check it out also.  Here's the link, Making Safe Choices.
   
   

4. OceanQuest ids going to post our illustrations to create an web page that will introduce our upcoming life-size animal and our report.

Explore Ocean Habitats 

I really think that we are making some great progress.  Now, that we know what ocean habitat that our animal lives in and what other plants and animals live there we can start to work on the background for our life-size animal. 

 We will need to:

1. Draw a realistic picture of what we would like our background to look like.
   
   
2. Develop a strategy to make our background.
   
   
3. We will need to find out the size of our animal so that we can measure out the background to make sure that it is big enough to fit our animal and have room on all sides so that people can learn about our animal's habitat.
   
   
4. Use all the resources that we have available to us (large bulletin board paper, construction paper, paint, markers, glue, tape...) to make sure that our background looks realistic.
   

Investigate Ocean Animals 

Now that we know more about our animal, we need to create a life-size animal to place onto the background that we have created. I suggest that we:

1. We each draw a picture of our animal in action that we can use as a blueprint to design of our life-size animal from. 
   
   

2. We will have to work together choose the best one to model our life-size animal after by coming to a consensus.  This probably will not be easy to do but we can work together to make sure that we come to a fair decision.
   
   

3. We can use this picture as a blueprint to create our life-size animal. Remember, we can use all the resources that we have available to us (large bulletin board paper, construction paper, paint, markers, glue, tape...) to make sure that our animal looks realistic.
   
   

4. Finally, we'll tape or glue our life-size animal onto our our background. I suggest using light newspaper to stuff our animal so that it looks three-dimensional.
   
   

5. We'll have to use clear packing tape to tape the outside of our mural to add extra strength.  We are now ready to attach plenty of string and hang it in our hallway.

 

Report Your Findings

 

We need to create a web page to share what we know about our animal, it's habitat, environmental problems facing our animal, and solutions that we can implement to help our animal with the National Commission (Ocean Act 2000) and the rest of the world.  

To do this we must:

1. Review all our explorations and work.
   
   
2. Write an essay to share our findings.  We will need to:
   
   
   • Introduce our animal.
   • Share our knowledge about our animal's habitat.
   • Educate others about our animal.
   • Address the environmental concerns that threaten our animal.
   • Recommend realistic solutions to these environmental threats.  
     
     
3. Create a web page that combines the essay that we will write and the digital images we have of our life-size animal.
   
   
4. Get help to post our web page onto the Internet and then send OceanQuest your web address. 

 

Other Fun Activities

The Java Aquarium
Sea Fun For Kids
Amazing Ocean Facts
Year of the Ocean's Kids Corner
National Geographic's Pirates
NEAq - Kid's Space - Make A Deep Sea Vent
Oceans Fishin' for Facts Scavenger Hunt Activities