Beach Explorations

This resource guide enables any teacher--beginner to expert--to help students understand basic seashore ecology. How is a surf-swept sandy beach different from a protected sandy beach? How is a mud flat different from a salt marsh or an estuary? This resource book is concerned with teaching students basic marine ecology concepts: habitat, tidal cycle, predator and prey, microscopic plankton, life cycles, food relationships, limiting factors, adaptation, succession, zonation, and above all, conservation. Students develop basic inquiry skills, including how to collect and identify plankton, use microscopes, conduct beach transects, measure tidal changes, map tidal pools, conduct zonation and succession studies, keep a field notebook, and much more. Besides a glossary of illustrated terms, this resource book contains 39 black-line masters for making transparencies and 15 student worksheets.