NEPTUNE Canada

Ocean Changes (Grade 6)

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Learning Objective(s)

To aim of this lesson is to get students thinking and observing changes in the oceans.

Introduction

Introduce the NEPTUNE project, defining what it is, how it works and what scientists can use it for. Explain how NEPTUNE is an exciting new adventure which explores areas which have never been seen before. This invaluable resource will enable students to study the conditions deep in the ocean and begin to understand how life survives in these extreme environments.

Materials

Activity

• Discuss how the conditions on the seafloor are different to just below the surface. Suggest - temperature (with depth it gets colder- except near the spreading centres where hydrothermal vents release hot fluids), light (becomes darker with depth as light cannot penetrate through the water very easily), creatures (how have they adapted to the dark environment?), pressure (with depth, pressures increase and animals must adapt to survive), predation (how do deep sea creatures attract their prey?).
  
• Ask students to search NEPTUNE on the internet. Read the new discoveries pages and the facts and figures information pages.
  
• Ask students to keep a daily journal (for a week) of anything new that they learn (discoveries, new information, new facts or figures, new species, new technology etc).
  
• Annotated pictures will be awarded extra marks. (for example – drawings/printed pictures of new species, previously unknown, that are stuck into the journal with a title and description can be awarded bonus points).
  
• Have discussion time in the classroom where any questions are answered and new information is reviewed as a group.

Extension

• Ask students to spend an hour creating a poster which will advertise all the information that they have written in their journal.

Assessment

• Have the students gained new knowledge about the deep ocean? Is this reflected in the writing? Do they understand that conditions are different on the ocean floor?
  
• Have they written questions or queries in the journal which demonstrates they have thought about how a process works, an animal survives or why life exists?
  
• If students have written or drawn a new species that they did not know exist award bonus points.

Related Website

Tags

surface, seafloor, pressure, ocean floor, deep sea creatures, prey, species