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Keep the excitement going with follow-up activities to help reinforce what your students have learned and to promote caring for our ocean planet. Each activity below emphasizes one or more of the key scientific concepts represented in the exhibit hall.

Is this My Neighborhood?
Who's Connected?
Are You a....?
Is the Seasoning Right?
What Can I Do?
Keep in Touch. How was the Trip?

Is This My Neighborhood?

Concept: Habitats are distinguishable by specific characteristics and the organisms that survive there. (Key concept: habitats and adaptations.)

Procedure:
1. Have each student select one organism seen during the visit to the ocean or aquarium, draw its habitat and list its survival needs.
2. As a class, review the students' creations, putting those organisms from similar habitats together. Discuss how their needs overlap.
3. Assign students to cooperative groups and ask each group to select a different habitat. Have each group create a new organism that would be adapted well to that habitat. Have them address how it would make its living getting food, its shelter, how it would escape from predators, the environment it would live in, and what things they would want to learn about it if they were scientists trying to study it further.

Extend:
4. Have students create a diorama with the necessary habitat elements for their imaginary organisms to survive.

Who's Connected?

Concept: Each organism has a niche as part of the food web, and there is an interdependence among organisms. Human actions impact the food web. (Key concept: human impact.)

Procedure:
1. Select a specific habitat and have students make food chain links by using strips of paper to show organisms and their predator/prey relationships. List each link on a separate strip of paper. For example:

| sun |-| phytoplankton |-| zooplankton |-| sardine |-| mackerel |-| dolphin|

2. Give each student a piece of a chain. Have them worktogether to put themselves in the order of the chain (food source next to predator).
3. Have students demonstrate the interrelationships among food chains by playing a food web game.
a. Make additional links of plants and animals for the specific habitat selected, including all levels of the food web (sunlight, nutrients, phytoplankton, zooplankton, predators, scavengers, and decomposers/nutrients).
b. Pass one link out to each person in the class. Get into a large circle.
c. Using a ball of yarn, have students pass the ball from prey to predator connecting each predator/prey relationship. Continue until all students have been connected.
d. Discuss what would happen if one organism were eliminated. Have one student lower his/her yarn and then have the others report who felt the effect.
e. Discuss what would happen if a specific article of trash were introduced into this marine habitat (plastic pellets, fishing net, plastic bags). Again have the targeted student lower his/her yarn in response to the item and discuss the effect.

Are You a....?

Concept: Animal adaptations ensure their survival. (Key concept: adaptations)

Procedure:
1. Discuss what animal adaptations the students were able to observe when they visited the aquarium and/or coastal areas. (ex: streamlined body, hard shell, claws, etc.)
2. Which adaptations seemed to be the most successful within a specific habitat? Have students discuss this question as a class.
3. Divide the class into groups.
4. Through charades, have each group act out some of the animals and their adaptations for the rest of the class to guess. Remind the students to show the habitat as well if possible.
5. Have each student research and draw his or her favorite animal including habitat, adaptations, and predator-prey relationships.

Is the Seasoning Right?

Concept: Living things have specific needs for survival. (Key concept: habitat and adaptations)

Procedure:
1. In groups, have the students create a recipe for a healthy habitat. Have each group select a habitat and then write the necessary ingredients for survival including the physical features (type of substrate and water), environmental effects (weather and tides), living inhabitants (microscopic to large), plants, predators, and prey. Encourage students to use terms similar to a recipe such as "toss" or "a pinch of."
2. Have groups share their recipes with the rest of the class.

What Can I Do?

Concept: Individual choices can make a difference in preserving the marine environment. (Key concept: human impact)

Procedure:
1. Have students identify their greatest concerns for the ocean environment.
2. Plan and follow through on a class project where the students can make a difference. This may be a beach clean-up (Adopt-A-Beach); stenciling storm drains by your school; creating posters about protecting the environment that could be displayed at the local library, public offices, or stores; creating books to be read to cross-age peers; or developing an ecology club to plan ongoing activities.
3. Have students summarize and evaluate their project experience through a writing assignment or presentation.

Keep in Touch. How was the Trip?

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