Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

20 minutes	Part B: How Do We Impact The Ocean?
15 minutes	Part C: What Are Our Need To Knows?
10 minutes	Part D: Turning Our Need To Knows Into Questions

5 minutes - Reflection

Part A: Activating Prior Knowledge

Differentiation:

Where students have completed Take 3 - Questions To Explore How You Need The Ocean - HASS - Years 4 to 6:

Remind students of the driving question for this unit: How are you connected to the ocean? Now pose the following question: How do you need the ocean? Before allowing students to answer, project or distribute this How Do We Need The Ocean? Image and invite students to work as a class or in pairs to think about how the features of this image relate to our connection to the ocean. You could use this How Do We Need The Ocean? Annotated Image to prompt students.
Now remind students of the clip they watched in the previous lesson and the topics they created their questions around, for example:
- The ocean is a crucial part of all life on earth
- The ocean is vitally important to indigenous peoples
- All waterways are connected and all landforms are connected by oceans
- The oceans play a vital role in the air we breath
- The oceans also moderate our climate, feed many people and absorb emissions
Explain to students that there is another way we are connected to the ocean. Invite students to suggest ideas, and then lead them to the conclusion that we are also connected to the ocean through the ways we impact it.
This will be the focus of this lesson.

Where students haven’t completed Take 3 - Questions To Explore How You Need The Ocean - HASS - Years 4 to 6:

Begin by explaining to students that in this lesson they will investigate the question, "How are you connected to the ocean?". Explain to students that there are lots of different ways that we are connected to the ocean, but primarily, these can be sorted into the following two categories:
- We are connected through the things we need the ocean for
- We are connected in the ways that we impact the ocean.
Explain to students that in this lesson they will be focusing on the second category: We are connected in the ways that we impact the ocean. However, before you do this it may be useful to understand the ways that the ocean is so important to us and why we need it. This will help students understand and appreciate the issue of our impact on the ocean more deeply. You could do this by sharing the Take 3 - Systems clip with students and completing a SEE-THINK-WONDER routine around this clip.

Part B: How Do We Impact The Ocean?

Step 1.

Explain to students that in this lesson they will be looking to answer the question: How do we impact the ocean?

Differentiation: For students who completed the previous lesson, Take3 - How Are You Connected To The Ocean? - HASS - Years 4 to 6, explain that this lesson will help them to understand our connection to the ocean further; it will help them to answer the driving question: How are you connected to the ocean?

The first task for students here is to think about what they already know about human impacts on the ocean. You could do this by:

Step 2.

Once all groups have had the chance to discuss and record their ideas, you can ask them to share their ideas with the class.

Step 3.

Explain to students that although there are lots of ways that humans impact the ocean they will be now focusing on just one issue: plastic waste. They will do this by watching a clip from Take 3 For The Sea.

Take 3 - Plastic: https://vimeo.com/451388496/76622fea03

Once complete, invite students to suggest what information in this clip was new to them, what they found interesting and what was surprising.

You can then ask students to suggest the main ideas presented in this clip, for example:

Impacts of plastic on indigenous food sources and culture (1:09)
Amounts of plastic entering oceans daily (1:47)
How plastic gets to the ocean (plastic pathways) (2:06)
Impacts of plastic on marine animals (690 marine species with plastics in their stomachs) (3:25)
The impacts of plastics that we can't see (3:55)
Different types of plastics (4:48)
Impacts of plastic waste on humans (5:26)

Part C: What Are Our Need To Knows?

Step 1.

Using the themes you identified or the ones provided above, invite students to think about what else they would need to know about these themes to understand them more deeply. This can be described as identifying your ‘need to knows’.

Note: You can explain to students that a ‘need to know’ is something you need to find out about a topic in order to understand this topic deeply. In this lesson, you are aiming to understand the answers to the question: How do we impact the ocean? To answer this question we need to identify where our gaps in knowledge are and what we need to find out to fill these gaps. These are your ‘need to knows’.

You can do this by breaking the class into as many groups as you have themes and assigning each group with a theme. Give each group a piece of paper and ensure each student has a pen. Ask each group to write their assigned theme in the middle of the paper and to draw a circle around this theme. Students can then work in their groups to create a mind-map of ideas around their theme, writing down things they think they might need to know about their theme in order to understand it more. Encourage students to be inspired by what other students are suggesting and add these ideas to the paper, but do not discuss or explain these ideas in detail at this stage: they will have the chance to ask questions and refine their ideas in the next step.

Explain to students that this can be a tricky task because they are being asked to admit that they don’t know things. It’s also hard to think of things that you didn’t know you needed to know. It could be useful to students to start each idea with “I don’t know…". For example, “I don’t know… why we use so much plastic” or “I don’t know… what the different types of plastic are and what they are used for”.

Step 2.

Once students have recorded a range of ideas, they can take some time to discuss their ideas and then clarify any points that need clearing up.

You can invite them to briefly share their ideas with the class.

Part D: Turning Our Need To Knows Into Questions

Step 1.

Once students have developed a list of ideas they would like to know more about they can begin converting these ideas into questions. This will help them further define what it is they want to know.

You can do this by asking students to return to their groups and to look at their ‘need to knows’. By changing the structure of these ideas and adding one of the 5Ws and an H to the beginning and a question mark to the end students can convert their ideas into questions that can be answered through research.

If students need further help to develop their questions you could distribute the Generating Questions Factsheet and spend some time working together to read through the information on this sheet. You could also take another look at other questions used in this lesson (e.g. the driving question or the questions used in the guided discussion) and think about what types of questions these are (e.g. open or closed). There will likely be an opportunity to use both types of questions in this lesson.

Step 2.

Once complete, encourage students to spend some time refining their questions by thinking about:

Does this question make sense?
Will it lead to the type of answer we want? (I.e. Will it only lead to a yes or no and if yes, is this enough? How can we change the question so that the answer will tell me more about the topic?)

Step 3.

Each student can then choose one question that they help to create that they would really like answered, that they are really interested in. They should write this down in their workbooks. You could also ask students to share these questions with the class.

Part E: Actions For Addressing Your Need To Knows

Differentiation:

For students completing the rest of this unit:

Ask students to turn to the question they chose and wrote down in their workbooks. They can then work in pairs or groups to think about what actions they could take to address this question. For example, is the best way to answer this question through online research, interviewing an expert, conducting an experiment or surveying a group of people?
Students can record their ideas in note form next to their question.

For students not completing the rest of this unit:

Students will work to answer their chosen question, or you can work in groups or as a class to select and research several questions (you could choose based on your available time and resources. If a question created by students requires a school-wide survey then this might be too much for your class to complete so you might need to steer the students towards something that can be completed in the library).
Students will then need to conduct the research required to answer their question and create a communication piece to share the results of their research. Depending on time and resources, this could be a video, podcast or poster. The title of the communication piece should be: “One way we are connected to the ocean is…”

Reflection

Invite students to work independently to read through the following quote (also available on the Student Worksheet) and describe what they think it means:

“If you're looking at the water, you've got your back to the problem.” - Troy Gaston

They could then team up with a classmate to share and to discuss their ideas, and make changes to their initial ideas if they heard anything that makes them think differently.

Take Action for the Global Goals

If you'd like to explore further the United Nations Global Goals, consider asking your students to carry out a plastic audit at home or in the classroom.

Students should put on gloves, tip out their rubbish onto a tarpaulin, and count the number of pieces of plastic in the bin.

If they do this work at home, they should return with their numbers - you could then make a chart or graph to show plastic waste across the class, and talk about how you might be able to reduce that waste.

Teacher Reflection

Take this opportunity to reflect on your own teaching:

What did you learn about your teaching practice today?
What worked well?
What didn't work so well?
What would you share?
Where to next?
How are you going to get there?

Take 3 - Questions To Explore How You Impact The Ocean

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