Ocean Bloggers Still Making A Difference in the Classroom!

In our October 2009 Donor’s Choose fund drive the ocean blogging community and their readers funded funded 14 projects, one of which was materials for coral reef flip books. This thank you letter from “Mr. M” explains the impact that we have had on the students at this high poverty school in the Chicago area. Remember, we can always do more! Please consider making your tax-deductible donation to an ocean class project through our Oceans in the Classroom initiative over at the right sidebar.
Mar 15, 2010
Dear Kevin Zelnio,
Hello,
This is Ms. M. We are so happy and grateful to have the journals and flip books.

The students are learning to research the coral reefs and marine animals. They have learned to set up two pages on the computer, one for the word document and the other for the coral reef and marine animal research. I taught them how to copy, paste, and save their work to a flash drive. Then they learned to print the saved research from the flash drive.

The students had to complete the research outlined in the table of contents for each the coral reef and the marine animal. For the Coral and Animals, they needed to provide information about the polyp, habitat, diet, colonies, reproduction, a did you know, how endangered, conservation, anatomy, vocabulary, and web sources in the table of contents and body of the flip books.

To initiate the student’s interest in the project we completed a packet of worksheets. Such as a word search on the ‘Plants and Animals of the Coral Reefs’, Word Unscramble of the ‘Animals of the Sea’, a ‘Name That Coral’ fill in the blank, an ‘Animal Research Sheet’, a ‘Compare and Contrast of the Coral and the Animal’, and a ‘KWL’. The worksheet packet was completed after the trip to the Shedd Aquarium.

This has been a very successful project. I am very grateful for your contributions!

With gratitude,
Ms. M.