Visit the Aquarium Sixth - Eighth Grade Online Curriculum : Watersheds

Students visiting the Aquarium as part of a grades 6-8 Structured School Program participate in activities that reinforce the concepts introduced in the curriculum. Students meet in the classroom for an introduction and then break up into three smaller groups that rotate between three activities, all based on the theme of watersheds.

Introduction
In the introduction to the 6-8 activities, students will discuss how watersheds connect all of the habitats represented in the Aquarium.

Classroom
Students will examine live animals and discuss how they are dependent on watersheds to survive and how they may be vulnerable to contamination caused by human action.

The Galleries
Students conduct water quality test on water samples taken from different aquatic habitats and use characteristics such as temperature and salinity to determine where these water samples would be found in a watershed.

The Galleries
Students explore the galleries, traveling from the mountains to the sea, to observe how habitat characteristics change across a watershed and determine which animals can survive in various parts of a watershed.