Under the Sea Topic - Lesson 9: Geography | Characteristics of Oceans

Designed for Year 3 and 4 but easily adaptable for other ages, this cross-curricular topic is swimming in creative and inspiring lessons. Discover weird and wonderful sea creatures, explore the major oceans and seas of the world, get creative with some fishy art and so much more!

Download the three complete Art lessons that form part of our 'Under the Sea' topic.

Download the two complete Computing lessons that form part of our 'Under the Sea' topic.

Download the two complete DT lessons that form part of our 'Under the Sea' topic.

Download the three complete Geography lessons that form part of our 'Under the Sea' topic.

Download the two complete Music lessons that form part of our 'Under the Sea' topic.

Download the six complete Science lessons that form part of our 'Under the Sea' topic.

This simple but effective lessons gives your class the opportunity to create something amazing out of something as humble as the paper plate! With ideas for shapes and decoration to use as a starting point, your children will then be able to develop their own ideas as they design, create and evaluate their own paper plate fish or other sea creature.

After finding out about the myth of Atlantis, your class will then use their imaginations to think about what they would see if they discovered this lost underwater city, before turning their ideas into a piece of artwork.

This lesson teaches your class about the art of mosaics and their origins before giving them the chance to create their own mosaic based on a sea animal or scene using a choice of methods and techniques.

Throughout this topic your class will come across dozens of interesting sea creatures but this lesson allows them to focus on just one as they research their chosen animal and use it as the basis for a multimedia presentation.

Everyone loves a good story and stories under the sea are always exciting! Give your class the chance to choose their own characters, problems and underwater settings as they plan and write their own under the sea stories to make into digital storybooks.

What do you see when you go to an aquarium? Using photographs as a stimulus, children will think about what they see at an aquarium before designing, making and evaluating their own model aquarium.

This fun project gives your class the chance to improve their sewing skills as they design, create and evaluate a stuffed soft toy in the shape of a fish or other sea creature.

Do your class know the names of the major oceans and where they are in the world? This lesson consolidates their knowledge of oceans and seas, as well as countries and continents, and focuses on map work to identify and locate major seas and oceans.

This lesson focuses on the five oceans and explores their geographical features, such as depth, size and average temperatures. This provides a great opportunity to get your class using statistics, data and graphs to answer questions.

This thought-provoking lesson looks at the many ways in which seas and oceans are used by humans, from transport and tourism to mining and food, and explores both the positive and negative impacts of these uses.

Introduce your class to Camille Saint-Saens. the famous composer of 'The Carnival of the Animals', in this lesson as they listen and respond to 'Aquarium' in a variety of ways. Please note that the music is not included in the lesson.

Bring the sound of the ocean to your classroom as your children investigate the sounds different instruments make and use them to create sounds that reflect life underwater, such as crashing waves, scuttling crabs and waving seaweed. They can them compile their sounds into musical sea poems to use both words and sounds to describe the ocean.

This lesson looks at what a habitat is and identifies different types of habitats and the animals who live there. It also explores how sea animals have adapted to their underwater habitat.

After thinking of the sea animals they already know, this lesson explores why it is important to be able to classify animals into groups before doing just that with terms such as vertebrate, invertebrate, mammal, mollusk, crustacean, amphibian and reptile.

What do a fish, a human and a daisy have in common? This lesson looks at the seven life processes common to all living organisms and finds out what each is. It also explores how some land and sea animals differ in the way they carry out these processes.

After recapping what the seven life processes are, this lesson looks in particular at respiration. It explores how mammals such as dolphins breathe on land and in the water, and how other underwater creatures take in oxygen from water instead of air.

This lesson identifies movement as one of the life processes common to all organisms and examines why it is necessary before exploring the difference between the skeletons of fish and humans and why these differences exist. It also looks at how other sea creatures move, reinforcing knowledge of different vertebrate and invertebrate sea creatures.

After defining what reproduction is and why it is a necessary life process, this lesson looks at the different ways in which sea animals reproduce (whether they give birth to live young or lay eggs) and gives your class the chance to explore how mammals, fish, crustaceans, reptiles and other groups of animals reproduce.