Amazing Ocean

Our ocean plays a major role in the water cycle, provides oxygen, stores carbon, regulates the climate, reduces storm damage to coastal areas, provides food and is important for health and wellbeing.

Explore how your school is connected to the ocean, wherever you are, and how we can all help look after it.

Seagrass is the only flowering plant in the ocean, and is found in calm, shallow, sunlit coastal waters around the world. Seagrass beds are an important habitat for many species as well as being an important carbon storing habitat.

Use this lesson to learn more about these superhero habitats and why we must look after them.

Animals are grouped according to their physical and behavioural characteristics. Vertebrates are animals with a backbone and invertebrates have no backbone. Within each broad group, there are sub-groups or classes.

This lesson focuses on the characteristics and features of marine mammals, amphibians, fish, birds and reptiles.

Rockpools are mini ecosystems - for a few hours each day they are cut off from the sea, providing a safe haven for creatures while the tide is out. Every rock, crevice and clump of seaweed is important to the anemones, crabs, shrimps and small fish that live there.

This session includes a rockpooling trip - if you can’t access the beach, use the following lesson, Rockpool Explorer (Inside).

More is known about the moon than about life in the deep ocean. The deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench, is 11,000m deep. If Mount Everest were to be placed in the trench, it would still sit 1-2 miles below the surface of the water.

This lesson will introduce students to the challenging conditions animals face in the deep, and look at some of the fascinating adaptions they've made to survive.