Explore the Deep Sea: Ocean Unit Study for Homeschool

I have a bachelor's and master's in education, taught in public schools for 9 years, and am in my sixth year of homeschooling. I LOVE Knowledge Crates because of how easy they make it for me to homeschool in the style that works for our family. With a Knowledge Crate and a library card, we're off to the races!

We did this deep sea unit study this fall to kick off our school year. My kids LOVE ocean animals, so they were already psyched, and then all of the hands-on activities really got them involved and having fun learning.

Now that you know a bit about me and my learners, let's take a look at this deep sea unit study!

Before I show you how I planned out this ocean unit study, please remember this is just my suggestion for our homeschool. There's no "right" pace; it really depends on what kind of pace and rhythm you have in your homeschool. This is just one possible way to do it, my friends!

• Ocean Currents Experiment
• Explore the Layers of the Ocean
• Book Index Scavenger Hunt

• Ocean Tides Flip Book
• Clay Ocean Animals
• Tide Pool Diorama
• Deep Sea Word Scramble

• Deep Sea Sub Crayon Resist Painting
• Blubber Experiment
• Life in the Ocean Card Game
• Practicing Cursive

• 3D Octopus Puzzle
• Shark Sense of Smell Experiment
• Harvey's "Shell" Phone Writing Project
• Deep Sea Sensory Play

• One-Point Perspective Aquarium Art
• Baleen Whale Experiment
• Deep Sea I-Spy
• I-Spy Graphing

• Sort the Animals
• Intro to Hand Lettering
• Ocean Zones Diorama

Throughout those six weeks, we read all the books that came in the ocean unit study crate (it even suggests in the guide which books/pages to read with each activity). We also got some more books from the library and looked for cool PBS Kids shows with ocean themes, too.

The other great thing about the Activity Guide for this ocean unit study is that it's written to be used by both the parents and the kids, so if you've got an independent learner who wants to do a certain activity on their own, they can just use the guide and off they go!

Now let's take a look at all of this in action! 

We kicked off our ocean unit study with a fun experiment to visualize how ocean currents are formed. Currents can be caused by changes in water temperature, like when colder water near the earth's poles mixes with warmer water from nearer the equator.

Mixing red boiling water with blue ice cold water allowed us to see "currents" forming right before our eyes!

We then went deeper by diving into the layers of the ocean! We read about the five main zones, painted them in watercolor, and then set about labeling each layer.

My son started learning cursive this year, so he was delighted to use cursive to label each zone. 🥰 We kept this painting safe to use at the end of our ocean unit study as the backdrop to our big diorama.

Another cool activity this week was our book index scavenger hunt. I taught my son how to use an index in the back of a book, and we practiced by searching for our Toob animals in the two nonfiction books that came in the crate.

This ocean tides flip book was such a simple activity that made a really cool impression. After reading about ocean tides, I had my kids draw on an index card a simple beach scene with the water at low tide. They can kept replicating the drawing, but with the tide coming up until it covered most of the card. We then repeating the drawings in reverse to get in back to low tide. 

We clipped the 15 index cards together and voila, a flipbook! It took us a few tries to get the cards staggered just a tiny bit so that our thumbs could easily flip them. Once we had it, the effect of rising and falling tide really came through so neat!

We spent an afternoon with this big set of modeling clay that came in the crate, creating creatures for a tide pool diorama that I'll show you next. There's plenty of clay, so we made some other animals for our end-of-unit big diorama, and just some for fun, too!

The tide pool diorama ... this activity was, hands down, my FAVORITE thing we created in this unit. I even made one too, I got so into it with my kids!

We painted a sturdy paper plate to be our tide pool. We added some sand, the clay creatures we'd made, and some little rocks, shells, and moss to be like seaweed.

Then we took a second plate, cut a big hole out of it, and glued on a circle cut from a clear plastic bag. When we put this plate on top of our tide pool, it's like we're looking into the ocean at high tide! 

Slide the top plate off and it's low tide, where we can see the creatures up close! These are just so beautiful. We'll be saving them to enter in our county fair next summer!

The ocean unit study crate also comes with a word scramble activity of all the animals that come in the two Toobs. This is a great way to practice identifying and spelling these fascinating creatures!

Here is another beautiful art project we did in this ocean unit study! We read about deep sea exploration in our Eyewitness Ocean book, then used crayons and watercolors to paint our own exploration scenes.

I love how the area illuminated by the submersible's light is colorful, and the rest is black except for the bioluminescent jellyfish!

We then investigated the question "How do ocean animals stay warm in frigid waters?" We used plastic bags on our hands and lined just one "glove" with Crisco ... when the kids plunged their hands in the icy bowl, it was immediately obvious to them how useful blubber is!

It's a fun challenge to use a timer and see how long you can keep each hand in the icy water and note even more the difference the "blubber" makes.

Our ocean unit study crate came with this fantastic card game that teaches and tests ocean animal trivia. It's a great choice for family game time!

As I said earlier, my son has really gotten into writing in cursive lately. I thought it would be fun to make some cursive tracing mats, like we always do for print in our preschool crates. I'm excited to have our first cursive tracing practice in this unit!

We love these 3D wooden puzzles that come in a lot of Knowledge Crates! My kids have a dolphin, dinosaurs, an ant, a scorpion ... they like to display them on their bookshelves. 😊 We loved getting this awesome octopus in the ocean unit study to add to our collection!

Sharks are known for their INCREDIBLE sense of smell ... some can smell just one little molecule of blood inside a million molecules of water!

We decided to test how our own sense of smell measures up against a shark's with this fun experiment. We lined up a bunch of cups of water, put some tomato juice (our blood from a wounded fish) in one cup, and then increasing diluted amounts in the rest. Then, starting at the cup with the most diluted amount of tomato juice, we started sniffing cup by cup until we could finally sense the tomato juice. It was amazing to realize how sharp a shark's sense of smell is!

Our fiction book in this ocean unit study crate was New Shark in Town, number one in a series about a shark named Harvey Hammer. To incorporate some creative writing into this unit, I made a "shell" phone template with a scrolling text window for us to compose a conversation between Harvey and one of his friends based on events in the book.

I'm excited for your kids to use this template in their ocean unit study crate and see what they come up with!

This crate comes with 19 different sea creature figurines from Safari Ltd, so we had plenty of characters to use in sensory play with the play dough in this unit!

Ooo, this project was so cool! My son made a one-point perspective drawing that gave the optical illusion of looking down an aquarium tunnel.

I was a bit afraid it might be too complicated for my 8-year-old, but with the step-by-step instructions it was totally manageable and came out AWESOME!

We used a ruler and pencil, and then traced over in permanent marker. The checkerboard floor came out so neat!

He drew his aquarium animals in crayon, using his Toob creatures as inspiration.

Finally, he went over the tank with watercolor. Isn't it so cool?!

Here's another cool experiment for our ocean unit study ... we simulated how baleen whales skim feed. Our krill was spices from our cupboard, and our baleen was a comb. ☺ This really helped my kids visualize how these whales strain their food instead of using teeth. 

Knowledge Crates unit studies almost always come with a great I-Spy activity! These are nice for keeping kids busy while making dinner, or for a quiet activity during church, etc.

Add in some math practice by graphing the animals you found in the I-Spy!

As we prepared to make our final project for this unit, a layers of the ocean diorama, we started off by sorting our Toob animal figurines by the ocean zone they most commonly call home.

Our next task was to create the title label for the diorama. We first did some hand lettering practice, experimenting with making bubble and block letters. Then my son chose his favorite style and made the title for his diorama.

Diorama time! We used the actual Knowledge Crates box for our diorama. My son glued in the layers of the ocean painting he made earlier in the unit, pasted in the title card he made, and started adding animals to the correct zones! It came out AWESOME!

I put together a BIG list of books to go with this ocean unit study that you can look up at your library and use throughout the ocean unit. There are both picture books and chapter books on the list.

You can get a free printable PDF version of the ocean unit booklist here, or head over to the same list on Amazon if that's more convenient for you.

Thank you so much for letting me share all about our experience doing this ocean unit study! We really loved all of the art, especially the tide pool diorama and the aquarium one-point perspective project.

The ready-to-go resources we used are listed below. I hope you and your kids have as much fun as we did! 🌊🦀🦈