In an art lesson plan for early elementary students, create a decorative aquarium in a shoebox. Look at books and online pictures of ocean habitats to give the students an impression of life beneath the sea. Instruct the students to make painted copies of the fish they see, and create crustaceans from clay. Remove one side of the shoebox and paint the inside in varying shades of blue and green to mimic the water. Place aquarium gravel on the bottom of the box and ask the students fill it with shells and the play dough crustaceans as seen on the pictures. You can then make corals from pipe cleaners and secure them in the gravel. Cut out the fish drawing and attach fishing lines. Fasten the strings on the lid of the shoebox and suspend them to give the impression that the fish are swimming in the sea. The lesson will take between two to three weeks.
In a cross-curriculum lesson plan for middle school students, you can combine social science and art by highlighting environmental issues in the ocean using a fishing net. You need a fishing net and all kinds of non-degradable junk that the students can collect over time from home. Suitable junk can include cleaned tins, drink cans, bottles and plastic bags. Ask the students to find pictures of marine wildlife and create some of the animals with the help of paper mache or salt dough painted when dried. Hang the fishing net on the wall and fill it with the garbage and the marine wildlife objects and your class will have a decorative yet thought-provoking visualization of the state of the ocean. The creation of the piece of art will take between three to four weeks.
Investigate clichés in art by preparing a lesson plan for older elementary or high school student about sunsets over the ocean. Find resources in literature and art that signify the romanticism of sunsets and discuss it with your students before you charge them with creating their own artwork. Resources can include calendar photographs, paintings by J. M. W. Turner and Frederic Edwin Church or famous poems, including Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Using their own imagination or inspiration from other sources, the students then can create their own ocean sunset paintings, drawings, collages or mosaics. Allow two to three weeks for the lesson plan.
Propose the development and design of an ocean video game in a cross-curriculum lesson plan for art, science and social studies aimed at high school students. Free software for the video games is available online, but the students will have to perform research about ocean habitats before starting to design. Ask the students to define rules, which can include a fishing game where the players have to leave protected species behind. Alternatively, design an environmental action game where players have to fight oil tanker disasters, over-fishing and polar ice melting to save the ocean. Arrange the project as a class incentive but give assignments according to individual students' talents with computer technology, science and art. Give the class up to three months for the project and release the game on the school's website once it is completed.