10 Best Midground Aquarium Plants

Best Midground Aquarium Plants in 2023

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Sea Searcher's Handbook Uses Multiple Skills to Teach Oceanography

The Sea Searcher's Handbook produced by the Monterey Bay Aquarium makes use of mathematical, critical thinking, and language skills to promote understanding of oceanogrpahy and ocean conservation.

The Sea Searcher's Handbook is divided into three broad categories: Searching Sea Habitats, Searching for Sea Life, and Searching for Interactions. As a general introduction, parents should note that many chapters end with a set of "critter cards" that have images of individual marine animals or plants with information about the animal or plant facing it on another card. Parents may want to photocopy critter cards and turn them into a set for playing concentration. Concentration promotes memorization skills, which are a great asset for achieving academic success. Parents may also want to place the critter cards on a key ring and take them to the aquarium to try and find the marine animals and plants on the cards in the various exhibits.

The first section of the Sea Searcher's Handbook deals with "Searching Sea Habitats" and is divided into the following chapters:

Salient points from the field notes follow for each chapter along with reviews of several selected activities. As mentioned, critter cards are located at the end of most chapters.

The chapter heading defines what a habitat is for readers. Each sea habitat is unique. This chapter briefly introduces all the habitats that are examined in detail later in the handbook. What marine plants and animals share in each habitat is that they must feed themselves and defend themselves long enough so that they can reproduce.

Among the activities in this chapter, "The Ocean Planet" activity (page 11) allows children to learn that the water we have on the planet is all that we will ever have as well as fractions. Children and parents will cut up an apple to represent the percentages of water found in oceans, polar or mountain glaciers, and in fresh water sources.

The rise and fall of the tides, the impact of incoming waves, and exposure to air have all contributed to making the flora and fauna of the rocky shore very adaptable and hardy. A zonation chart (page 17) describes what characterizes the spray zone, high-tide zone, mid-tide zone, and low-tide zones of the rocky shore. The chart also shows examples of what kinds of animals exists in the different zones.

The Sea Searcher's Handbook describes the effect of the moon on the Earth's center of gravity, which produces tides (pages 18 -19)), including the phenomena of spring tides and neap tides.

Two of the activities in this chapter feature children working with newspapers to promote advanced English and critical thinking skills.

The "Sometimes Wet, Sometimes Hot!" activity (page 21) shows children how to read tide tables to know the time and height of tides. Children graph this information for individual days and then look up the moon phases in the newspaper and record this information on the graph paper with the corresponding date and tidal information. The objective is to have children acquire a visual representation of how moon phases relate to tides.

The "News Bulletin" activity (page 23) encourages children to make a bulletin board of newspaper clippings with articles related to the seashore and ocean.

Sand protects animals that bury themselves in it, but the impact of waves continuously endangers animals that live on the sandy shore. A zonation chart (page 31) illustrates the different kinds of animals that live on the high beach, the surfline, and the submerged beach zones.

Among this chapter's activities, the "Crawl Like a Crab" activity (page 34) makes use of a child's desire to move. "Crawl Like a Crab" asks children to study sandy shore animals and then do a charades guessing game for one another based on what they discover.

The "Seashore Math" activity (page 36) challenges children to use ratios to estimate distances of beach hoppers and use percentages to find out how much food a sea otter needs to eat every day to live.

The presence of salty or fresh water characterizes wetlands. Wetlands may be swamps, bogs, marshes, or sloughs such as the Elkhorn Slough near Monterey, California. People have wanted to drain wetlands for agricultural land and development in the past and still do in the present. Scientists and environmentalists are working to educate the public about the importance of maintaining wetlands areas to prevent damage to these areas now and in the future. Wetlands support more life than many other ecosystems due to the presence of detritus, decayed particles of plants and animals.

The "Animal Riddles" activity (page 56) challenges children to describe an animal in their own words and have others guess what animal they are describing.

Forests of giant kelp plants provide food and shelter to a variety of marine animals. Kelp is also used in many food products, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and clothing.

The "Do You Eat Kelp?" activity (page 67) encourages children to become researchers by going to the store and examining products for the presence of kelp, which is described by words such as algin, alginic acid, carageenan, and nori.

The Sea Searcher's Handbook writes that two groups make up life in the open sea: plankton also known as drifters and nekton also known as swimmers. Microscopic plants called phytoplankton produce oxygen through photosynthesis and produce most of the ocean's oxygen. Clean oceans are essential for the survival of phytoplankton and their production of oxygen.

The "Does Your Boat Float" activity (page 81) lets children have fun experimenting with a variety of materials to test for buoyancy as well as the effect of wind.

The Sea Searcher's Handbook informs readers that while the deep sea covers almost sixty percent of the Earth's surface, scientists know more about the moon than the deep sea. The Monterey Canyon, which lies off the Monterey Bay, is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. Animal life in the deep ocean must adapt to the effects of pressure as well as the decrease to complete absence of light.

The "Unknown Worlds" activity (page 98) asks children to compare ways that the deep sea and outer space are similar and different. This activity provides many open-ended questions to expand on children's critical thinking faculties.

The second section of the Sea Searcher's Handbook is entitled "Searching for Sea Life" and features the following chapters: Suited for the Sea, Marine Mammals, Fishes, and Sharks, Skates, and Rays.

Each habitat creates different strategies for survival among marine plants and animals that affect behavior, body parts, feeding strategies, protection, and reproduction.

The activity "At Home in the Sea" (page 114) has children brainstorm what a chosen marine animal needs for survival compared to him or her. This activity encourages children to identify the similar needs that animals and humans have, but our different ways of satisfying those needs.

The Sea Searcher's Handbook informs readers that marine mammals are like humans in that they breathe air, have hair, and nurse their young. Gray whales and sea otters are both marine mammals.

The "Take an Imaginary Trip" activity (page 134) asks children to imagine they are on a boat following a gray whale as it migrates from Alaska to Baja California and to write a log describing the whale's activities.

The "Ollie Otter Lunch Bag Puppet" activity (pages 138 - 139) provides cut-out body parts that a child can color before pasting them on the paper bag. This activity encourages children to act out the sea otter's ability to open clam shells.

Fish have adapted to aquatic life mostly through their body shape. The Sea Searcher's Handbook details the roles of all the following fish body parts: swimbladder, gills, scales, fins, lateral line, mouth, dorsal and anal fins, pectoral fin, and caudal fin.

A challenging activity from this section is entitled "A Scientist's Clues" (page 150). In this activity, children first choose an object and write up its description without telling another child or adult what it is. Then, the child reads his or her description to see if someone else can identify the object without seeing it. After doing this several times, players then use different images of fish to play the game.

The most important similarity among sharks and their kin according to the Sea Searcher's Handbook is that their skeletons are made of cartilage rather than bone. They also are characterized by internal fertilization as a reproduction technique and have gills without covers.

The "Shark Trivia" activity (page 164) asks children to research sharks and make up a list of questions about them and then hold a shark trivia competition.

The third section the Sea Searcher's Handbook is entitled "Searching for Interactions" and features two chapters devoted to food webs in the sea and people and the sea.

The Sea Searcher's Handbook reminds readers that food chains are not a single sequence, but rather interlocking food chains called webs. However, food chains and food webs are often represented as pyramids such as the one on page 175 showing a sea otter at the top of the pyramid.

The "Who am I?" activity (page 181) is an advanced version of marine animal charades. In this charade game, though, the children take turns pantomiming how the marine animal eats for the other players to guess.

This chapter is devoted to human interaction with the oceans from how to clean up after beach outings to how to choose Earth-friendly household products.

Two activities from this section stand out for teaching children how to implement the lessons learned in the Sea Searcher's Handbook:

The first activity is the "Planet Earth Test" (page 192) that asks children to evaluate their toys to see which ones are plastic and made from non-renewable resources. This activity shows children and their parents that they can make purchasing choices that are better for the planet than others.

The second activity is "The Cleanest Town" (page 196) that gives children the chance to design a town that has little or no pollution.

The activities described throughout this review are a small sampling of what is available in the Sea Searcher's Handbook. The activities and craft projects in this handbook coupled with ocean-themed books will make for an engaging series of story times that parents could share with their children or with groups of children. The book Swimmy by Leo Lionni would be a good picture book to read to a young child to start off a story time.

Overall, The Sea Searcher's Handbook is a wonderful resource for parents and teachers. More activities may be found on the Monterey Bay Aquarium's games and activities page ( ) and Homework Help for Ocean topics may be found at ( ).