If we are being honest, you could spend an entire year teaching all of the different marine vertebrate species and animals! But with a school year, as you know, time is limited. This is how the Marine Vertebrates ABC book was born. I wanted to give my students the opportunity to learn about a marine species of their choice and go deeper with their learning – without it consuming too much time.
I also wanted to have a project the whole class could take part in as a collaborative effort. To accomplish both of these tasks, we created a children’s book as a class: The ABCs of Marine Vertebrates.
How to Set up the Marine Vertebrates Project
The good news is that this project is pretty simple to put together. The bad news? Your students might struggle to pick one marine vertebrate. There are so many to choose from!
- Assign each student a letter. Or have students pick a letter. If there are more letters in the alphabet than students in your class, you can always assign those leftover letters to a few students as extra credit.
- Pick an animal. Next, have students pick a marine vertebrate that begins with the letter they were assigned. This can be a challenge for some letters, so I let them use the scientific name or the common name, which gives them a bit of flexibility.
- Gather information. Once they’ve picked their marine vertebrates, students will fill out the full taxonomy (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species) and draw a picture. I also ask them to add any fun facts and key information they learn about their species as well.
- Color the page. The last step for students is to color their page. I ask them to make it look nice and presentable, just like a real book would be! Then you can laminate the pages and bind them, or put them into sheet protectors and store them inside of a binder.
Ideas for How to Extend this Project
You can take this marine vertebrate project even further with a few extension activities.
One of my favorite ways to extend this project is to give our book creation to a local elementary school. If you do this, you can have students write a letter to go with the gift, explaining why the book was created.
You can also have students scale their pages into posters and hang them in the classroom or the hallway. This makes for great decor for next school year.
If you have a good chunk of time to commit to this project, put students into small groups and have each group create their own Marine Vertebrate ABC book.
Another way to extend this project is to have students present their pages! It’s fun to see them share their thinking, and the kids love seeing everyone else’s pages.
Whether you choose to extend this activity or keep it as-is, it’s a fun and engaging way to dig a little bit deeper during your marine vertebrates unit! Your students will enjoy getting to learn more about a specific species and will have the chance to learn collaboratively with others.
Leave a Reply