Sponge Bob and Marine Biology Homeschool Unit Study 🐙🐬🦑

At the end of February we returned from a week long vacation to Folly Beach South Carolina. Having minimal time to prep much of anything, I looked through the curriculum that I hadn’t used up yet this year and stumbled upon, The Good and The Beautiful Marine Biology unit study. This seemed appropriate as we just returned from the ocean with ziplock bags of shells, lots of memories of jelly fish and sand dollars and a new found love of Sponge Bob Square Pants from the hotel cable television. The kids were 100 percent on board and excited with the plan.

We started off this unit study with a new Spotify “Under the Sea Playlist” that I created to set the mood.

Trapped A Lobster Tale

We were able to begin this unit by attending a performance of the play Trapped A Lobster Tale. It was appropriately enough a play set in a fictional town of Crusty Isle, Maine and all about the lobstering world.

A few of our favorite books this unit…

The Usborne Big Book of Sea Creatures

Wish for a Fish: All About Sea Creatures (Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library)

Clam-I-Am!: All About the Beach (Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library)

Hark! A Shark!: All About Sharks (Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library)

Shark lady : the true story of how Eugenie Clark became the ocean’s most fearless scientist / written by Jess Keating ; illustrations by Marta Alvarez Miguens

Surprising sharks / Nicola Davies ; illustrated by James Croft

The strangest thing in the sea : and other curious creatures of the deep/ written by Rachel Poliquin ; illustrated by Byron Eggenschwiler.

A few of our favorite Videos

I’ve accepted the fact that the Kratt brothers are much better at teaching my children then I’ll ever be. So be it. 😂 There have been many instances when they bust out knowledge of some random animal and when I ask how they know that, 99 percent of the time the answer is “Wild Kratz”.

SciShow Kids is also a favorite around here.

The Good and The Beautiful Marine Biology

For the most part we followed the Good and The Beautiful Marine Biology curriculum that had some experiments planned out for us.

Sponge Bob Square Pants

To spice things up I added some Sponge Bob Square Pants into the mix. After doing a bit of research I discovered the creator of the show, Stephen Hillenburg was a Marine Biology teacher for three years (he also worked as a fry cook at a seafood restaurant in Maine!) and that this is actual a layered and intelligent show based off of some real life ocean knowledge. Fascinating. Many of the characters in the show take on some of the characteristics of the species in real life. Like Patrick, who is a starfish and not very smart….starfish have no brain. We used the Sponge Bob characters to learn more about marine life in a much more entertaining way. If I had just normally talked about a starfish….boring….but…comparing pictures of Patrick with actual starfish photos and seeing if his personality matches up with that of a starfish…that’s a good time. Throw in the fact that a week before they were looking at real life starfish in tide pools in South Carolina, we had the recipe for a perfect learning experience.

Random Fun

The kids loved these Melissa and Doug Ocean Mosaic Sticker Puzzles.

Homeschool is still going well. I can’t believe we approaching our last couple of months of our first year! Anika continues to use Right Start Math, Exploring Math with Creation and Life of Fred. We also added in the Musical Multiplication from the Good and The Beautiful. Jacob is finishing on the last unit for Fundations and is also starting the last module of Eureka Math.