Ocean unit - informational text

The ocean unit is an excellent unit for using informational text. We used a set of books published by Scholastic about the different zones of the ocean and animals that live in those zones. I am unable to show a photo of the books we used because of copyright laws, however, Scholastic Book Wizard is located at the bottom of this blog and can be used to search for these books. ( I do not receive anything from Scholastic, I just really like the company.)

I used the table of contents with my students to chose which animal to read about first and to model that these books don't have to be read in order. After reading about each zone, we listed all the animals that live in that zone on a large piece of chart paper.

Each student received an index card to illustrate an interesting animal from that zone.

The students then glued their pictures to the poster near the name of their animal. We displayed our posters in the hallway.

We also used Dr. Jean's song called Oceans on her Sing to Learn CD. You can download a printable book to go with the song on http://www.drjean.org The song is sung to the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" and can be used without the CD.