Seaweek resources

Seaweek is New Zealand’s annual national week about the sea. It is hosted by the New Zealand Association for Environmental Education and includes a wide range of events, activities, competitions and opportunities for action. It usually runs for a week from the end of February – early March.

With 75% of New Zealanders living within 10 km of the coast, marine science need not be limited to just 1 week, marine contexts can link to many different science concepts. This resource provides a sample of the Hub's marine resources. Use the Related topics & Concepts tab at the top of a page to find an even wider variety of teaching resources.

Below is a selection of unit plans and other teacher support materials that we have grouped under possible teaching topics.

• Healthy Seas – Healthy People
• Human impacts on the sea
• Habitats and ecosystems
• Mātauranga Māori and the moana
• Sea creatures
• The ocean’s chemical and physical processes
• The ocean and climate change
• Ecosystem services
• Aquaculture
• Department of Conservation marine infographics
• Building Science Concepts
• Teacher support materials
• Literacy links
• Citizen science

Healthy Seas – Healthy People

Articles:

• Kaimoana in the Hauraki Gulf includes the video: Testing for toxins in kaimoana
• Iwi and kaimoana
• Monitoring shellfish
• Restoring mauri after the Rena disaster
• Toxins and food webs

Activities:

• Investigating toxins and bioaccumulation in marine food webs and related interactive: Bioaccumulation in the sea
• Tracking toxins

Human impacts on the sea

Articles:

• Human impacts on the Bay of Plenty
• Human impacts on marine environments
• Ecosystem tipping points and stressors
• Investigating marine and coastal tipping points
• Dynamic Seas
• Fisheries in New Zealand – timeline

Videos:

• Farmland run-off into estuaries
• Our role in ocean acidification
• Precision Seafood Harvesting – Changing the Way New Zealand Fishes

Activities:

• Nutrient impact experiment
• Fisheries role-play
• Modelling marine stressors and tipping points
• Identifying marine stressors
• Environmental thinking and planning with ecosystem-based management (EBM)

Citizen science project: Marine Metre Squared

Habitats and ecosystems

Articles:

• Marine habitats
• Habitats in the Bay of Plenty
• Life on a reef
• Antarctic marine ecosystem
• Adapting to marine habitats
• Young Ocean Explorers episode topics: harbours, kelp

Interactive: Marine ecosystem

Activities:

• Beach visits – habitats and food webs
• Where do I live?
• Estuary metaphors

Mātauranga Māori and the moana

Articles:

• Iwi and kaimoana
• Reviving toheroa (this includes the video Toheroa: Rejuvenating a Delicacy)
• Valuing estuaries
• Protecting estuaries
• Learning from the tangata whenua
• Working together to restore the Ōngātoro/Maketū Estuary
• Love Rimurimu – an ocean of potential for seaweed (includes the interactive Love Rimurimu – planning pathways)
• Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge
• Awhi mai awhi atu – kuku restoration (includes the video Mussel ropes)
• Looking at ecosystem-based management (EBM)
• Building Science Concepts: Life between the tides
• Building Science Concepts: Tidal communities
• Glossary of kupu Māori mō te ara o Hinekirikiri (PDF)

Activities:

• Estuaries – a Māori perspective (includes the video Kaitiakitanga)
• Environmental thinking and planning with ecosystem-based management (EBM)

Sea creatures

Articles:

• Noisy kina
• Crabs finding home
• Plankton
• Bryozoans
• Cockles
• Sea stars (includes 2 interactives: dorsal view and ventral view of sea stars)
• Mussels

• New Zealand’s endemic dolphins
• Whales
• Young Ocean Explorers episode topics: rays, crayfish, orcas, triplefins, Sandager’s wrasse, dolphins, kelp, turtles and sharks

The ocean’s chemical and physical processes

Articles:

• Ocean salinity
• Ocean temperature
• Ocean density
• Ocean dissolved gases
• Ocean motion

Activities:

• Floating eggs
• Investigating sea water
• Water temperature

The ocean and climate change

Articles:

• Carbon dioxide in the ocean
• The ocean and the carbon cycle (includes the video Southern Ocean carbon sink)
• The ocean, CO₂ and climate change – timeline
  
• Teachers learning and planning together

Student activity: Ocean acidification and eggshells

Ecosystem services

Mussels includes the videos: Revive our Gulf and Mussels filtering water

Aquaculture

Articles:

• Farming green-lipped mussels – introduction
• Extracting bioactives from mussels
• Investigating the native sea cucumber for export
• Sea sponges and rongoā

Department of Conservation marine infographics

The Department of Conservation and the Science Learning Hub have collaborated to create a series of interactives that feature many of DOC’s marine infographics.

• Marine diversity in Aotearoa New Zealand
• New Zealand marine habitats
• Threats to marine habitats
• Areas of marine ecological importance
• Mussel reefs and biodiversity

Building Science Concepts

Building Science Concepts: Life between the tides is a partial replication of Building Science Concepts Book 21:

• Building Science Concepts: Life between the tides – article
• Life between the tides – interactive
• Changes on the beach – activity

Building Science Concepts: Tidal communities is a partial replication of Building Science Concepts Book 22:

• Building Science Concepts: Tidal communities – article
• Tidal communities – interactive
• Beach visits – habitats and food webs – activity
• Māori mō te ara o Hinekirikiri – kuputaka – glossary article

Teacher support materials

Join our discussion about marine education and Seaweek – register in our online discussion forum on Slack.

Online professional development

Are you planning for Seaweek or a marine topic? We have it covered in our recorded professional development webinars:

• Diving into marine resources, join us and Steve Hathaway from Young Ocean Explorers, as we introduce some exciting marine teaching and learning resources.
• Seaweek 2016 focuses on marine content and planning.
• Seaweek 2015 focuses on the nature of science and teacher ideas.

Unit plans

Topic planners: Marine resources – food webs, adaptation, marine habitats, marine biodiversity.

Education research and classroom experiences

Articles:

• Adapting SLH activities: providing another context
• Supplementing SLH activities with other artefacts

Literacy links

These Connected articles provide a brief synopsis of the original jounal article, associated teacher support material and links to the digital resources on TKI. They also provide a wealth of related Hub content and activity ideas – wrap-around resources to deepen or extend student thinking and learning, practise content vocabulary or prompt inquiry.

• Down the drain
• Sea science
• Who’s eating who?
• Testing the waters

Citizen science

Using online citizen science opportunities as a way to deepen student learning and engagement is easier than you think.

• Litterati and Litter Intelligence are two citizen science projects that ask people to photograph, geotag and classify litter.
• Marine Metre Squared supports communities to monitor their local seashore. In Sediment and seashores – monitoring Otago Harbour, explore how it was used by another PSP project.
• Use Spyfish Aotearoa to discover, count and identify fish species that live within our marine reserves.