Finding Finn

I hope you’re ready for our final adventure! We are on a school trip to the edge of the reef.  Won’t it be fun to play a game of hide and seek with all our fish friends, but Finn is far too good at hiding and we can’t find him.  We go and tell the teacher but even she can’t find him.  We need to send out a search party. Can we find Finn?

At Ocean School we are all excited for our upcoming school trip to the edge of the reef.  We need to get permission from our parents for us to go. The head teacher Mr Great White has asked for our help to write a letter to the parents.

We were heading to the coral reef with our class. Once we got there were had to find out all about the different habitats under the sea. We did a Burn2Learn to find out lots of different facts.

When we arrived our teacher Miss Ray asked us to find our favourite part of the reef and describe what we could see from there. We thought about the different habitats and what they looked like.

As we were swimming around the coral we noticed all off the plastic floating around the water. We decided as a class to make posters to warn people about the dangers of putting plastic in the ocean.

Now we had explored for a morning Miss Ray challenged us to sort out the different sea creatures into their habitats. We had to think about what protection each creature needed.

Whilst on our trip we played a game of hide and seek with all our fish friends, but Finn was far too good at hiding and we couldn’t find him.  We told the teacher but even she couldn’t find him. Once we arrived back at school Miss Ray taught us all about how to classify things in the ocean. We thought about what was a reptile, fish, coral, plant or invertebrate.

Finn still hadn’t returned so we made lost posters to put up around the ocean to help find him.

Our poster worked and we had a call from a turtle who told us to come and meet him as he had seen Finn. We raced off to find him but when we got there we were shocked to find that Timmy had a straw stuck in his nose. We had to rescue him. We wrote a diary about meeting Timmy and saving him.

As a class we debated for and against the use of plastic straws. We had heard on the news that some companies had started to use paper straws and some customers were not happy! We thought about reasons for both.

We started a petition to stop people using plastic straws as it is hurting sea life. We decided to design our own straws made out of a recyclable material. We tested out tissue paper, paper and card to see what the best one was. We recorded our results.

We then looked at how straws have fancy patterns to make them more appealing. We made four different designs for our paper straws and then we chose our favourite one. We then made our new straws with the designs we had chosen. We then tested them out.

We decided to do a sea clean-up especially where the sea turtles were living. We researched the four different types of sea turtles and their habitats so that we could head there. We made a booklet on each turtle.

We then sketched and carefully coloured a picture of Timmy to show the world and make them realise what was happening when they threw away a plastic straw.

Timmy sent us to meet Jemma the Jellyfish. However when we found Jemma she was trapped in a plastic bag! We made a jellyfish using plastic bags to show people the dangers.

This week we were sent to see Sammy the Seal. We researched different seal habitats so that we knew where to look for Sammy.

We were so worried about all the plastic that was hurting animals that we collected it up and made a picture of Finn using it. We thought it would raise the awareness of this problem.

We decided to reuse all of the plastic bottles we found on the ocean and turned them into flower pots and pencil pots.

 All of the animals were having problems because of the plastic so we decided to make a fish from plastic to show what is happening to the ocean.

We thought about how food chains worked and that if one animal eats plastic how it goes into another animals body!

To celebrate Finn's release back into the ocean we had a party with our parents. We played different fish related games and even sold some seashell souvenirs.