NOAA Sea to Sky: Education resource database

Data in the Classroom has structured, student-directed lesson plans that use historical and real-time NOAA data. The five modules address research questions and include stepped levels of engagement with complex inquiry investigations with real-time and past data.

The Deep Ocean Education Project is a collaboration among NOAA Ocean Exploration, Ocean Exploration Trust, and Schmidt Ocean Institute featuring high-quality ocean exploration and science education materials from the three organizations. The Deep Ocean Education Project website – launched in 2021 – is built around themes that are easily searchable, address key ocean-related phenomena, and encourage and support three-dimensional approaches to teaching and learning for K-12 education. The objective is to provide a one-stop resource hub for public, educators, and students looking for deep-sea educational materials. The website also includes information on how to connect with research vessels, including a list of upcoming events and opportunities, and live feeds of expeditions.

This learning module is a cooperative effort between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NOAA’s National Ocean Service. It informs about sea level rise, its causes, and impacts; and challenges students to think about what they can do in response. This module features an integrated educational package of grade level-appropriate (6-12) instruction and activities centered on a 23-minute video presentation. Note that the video has scheduled pauses so educators may facilitate discussions of presented topics. Discussions will extend the total viewing time of the video.

Students examine actual data from a NOAA sea scallop survey in 2012, organize it, and make inferences about what type of story the data might tell.

Through role-playing, teamwork, and a little fate, this activity provides students with an opportunity to get an "insider's" view of what it takes to be an active stakeholder in a commercial fishery. Whether a boat owner, dockside buyer, processing plant owner, distributor, or retail seafood store operator, each student will get a deeper sense of the complex factors that determine the viability of a commercial fishery. Students will learn to understand the real costs that contribute to eventual market value, as well as experience some of the unanticipated gains or losses that can occur at any stage along the way.

Monitor National Marine Sanctuary offers a variety of free resources for educators. Resources include social studies activities, as well as science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) activities, lesson plans, and guides. Each section below is filled with STEM activities, lesson plans, and games. Explore the Civil War and USS Monitor, World War I, World War II, Shipwrecks and STEM, Wrecks as Reefs, the Outer Banks Maritime Heritage Trail, and more.

In this activity, students learn about tides and salinity in estuaries. They observe time-lapse models of tides and salinity distribution in the York River, part of the Chesapeake Bay-Virginia National Estuarine Research Reserve. They will learn how salinity changes with an incoming and outgoing tide, observing the dynamics of the salt wedge at various sites along the river.

Marine debris has major impacts on all kinds of marine animals, especially sea turtles. These iconic animals can confuse plastic bags and balloons for jellyfish, their favorite food. In this interactive video program, students can virtually participate in a simulated sea turtle necropsy, or animal dissection, learn how trash can get to the ocean and impact sea turtles, and learn how we can all help stop marine debris! Throughout the video, there are places to pause and discuss observations and predictions with students. For more information, additional activities, and lesson extensions, please see the Program Activities Guide. 
Please be aware that the model dissection may upset sensitive viewers, especially younger students. 

Materials like consumer plastics, metals, rubber, paper, textiles, lost fishing gear, vessels, and other lost or discarded items can easily end up in the ocean, where it becomes marine debris. Marine debris threatens the ocean and its resources, the economy, and safe navigation. Animals like turtles, marine mammals, birds, and other creatures can die when they accidentally swallow or get tangled up in marine debris. These materials can also crush sensitive habitats like seagrass beds or coral reefs. All national marine sanctuaries face the challenges of marine debris and the harmful impacts that come along with managing this problem. This collection features resources related to the problem of marine debris, NOAA and sanctuary system programs, and the solution to pollution.

This collection of six separate lessons includes tutorial videos for each themed lesson, except ecological field modeling.

1. Density dynamics: Experiment by creating four model bodies of water and observe how they compare. 
2. Ecological field monitoring: Get into the field and investigate the ecosystems in your local community using field equipment.
3. Glaciers: Investigate how topography came to be through glacial activity 33,000 years ago. Use geologic and physical tests to uncover the evidence left behind by the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Track and hunt down the path laid by ice giants of the past.  
4. Marine debris & microplastics: Discover how marine debris impacts the environment as you experiment with buoyancy and design a model ocean with circular currents.
5. Watersheds: Explore how we impact our water systems and the watersheds that sustain our population. Create a model coastal community and observe how pollutants travel within a watershed
6. Weather & climate: Explore the differences between weather and climate, look at real-time NOAA weather and climate data, experiment with sea level rise, and create coastal resiliency models.