Layers of the Ocean & Their Animals MLB

I spent most of the last hour doing the calculations for how to do a Layers of the Ocean main lesson book. We did a great Science Club Expo ("Creep into the Deep") on this and for that I had the students create calendars to give to their parents. Each page of the calendar you were going successively deeper into the ocean, and the artwork for each month showed an organism that would live in that part of the ocean. The notes are on my Ecology webpage.

But this time I am helping a student who wanted to learn about the Ocean Zones as her Math MLB topic. Our month's focus this month is on Place Value & Computation, so working with timelines is a nice project. We did a timeline for the years from when the Titanic sank and this year (at one inch per year, it comes to exactly three yards in 2020). Now, the Ocean Deep!

Here's how the math works out.

We are using a standard Mercurius main lesson book 32 x 24 cm. Each page of this book is 9.45 inches long. We will rotate the book to position it vertically, instead of horizontally, so that you feel you are going deeper when you turn the page. So, I suppose I should say that each page is showing 9.45 inches of depth. There are 32 pages in the book.

We want to go from the ocean's surface to the bottom of the Challenger Deep (10,994 meters).

If one inch on our scale = 40 meters, the whole ocean will fit with a bit of room to spare for explanatory information.

9.45 inches x 40 = 378 meters per page

I went through the book and labeled each page and it all fits. If you have one of these books in hand, I can tell you what the numbers are, but it's really ideal for the child to add 378 over and over and label all the depths (once an adult has done the harder part of figuring out the scale).

Rotate your book so that it is oriented vertically, with the staple spine at the top. At the bottom of page 1, I wrote Ocean Surface, as if the page's end was the line between sky and water, and as soon as we turn the page we will be getting wet. On that page we will have the Title of the book and some seabirds flying in the sky (like Steve Jenkins begins his book Down, Down, Down: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea).

At the bottom of page 2, where the staple is, we will be at 378 meters. At the bottom of page 3, where the end of the page is, we are at 756 meters.

By the bottom of page 2, you will have already left the Sunlight Zone and entered the Twilight Zone.

1,134 m at the bottom of page 4

By the bottom of page 4, you will have entered the Midnight Zone.

1,512 m at the bottom of page 5

1,890 m at the bottom of page 6

2,268 m at the bottom of page 7

2,646 m at the bottom of page 8

3,024 m at the bottom of page 9

3,402 m at the bottom of page 10

3,780 m at the bottom of page 11

4,158 m at the bottom of page 12

By the bottom of page 12, you will have entered the Abyss.

4,536 m at the bottom of page 13

4,914 m at the bottom of page 14

5,292 m at the bottom of page 15

5,670 m at the bottom of page 16

6,048 m at the bottom of page 17

By the bottom of page 17, you will have entered the Trench.

6,426 m at the bottom of page 18

6,804 m at the bottom of page 19

7,182 m at the bottom of page 20

7,560 m at the bottom of page 21

7,938 m at the bottom of page 22

8,316 m at the bottom of page 23

8,694 m at the bottom of page 24

9,072 m at the bottom of page 25

9,450 m at the bottom of page 26

9,828 m at the bottom of page 27

10,206 m at the bottom of page 28

10,584 m at the bottom of page 29

10,962 m at the bottom of page 30

and then 32 meters more and you get to 10,994 meters! So, if one inch = 40 meters and you have to show 32 meters, you get a nice little easily reducible fraction to work with. You mark approximately 4/5 of an inch below the staple spine and you're at the bottom of the Challenger Deep!

With the rest of page 31, I'm thinking we can do a map of where the Mariana Trench is in the world. And on page 32, the last page of the book, a little table with the Zones of the Ocean. I'll keep the book oriented vertically the whole time, including the front and back covers.

I wrote a blog post with a helpful table of the Ocean Zones and also included a bunch of books about the animals that live in them. Check it out if you're looking for resources!

As far as organizing this project, I think we would draw the title page and seabirds first, do the calculations and label the depth at the bottom of each page second, add the table of Ocean Zones to the last page of the book third, add the map (oil pastel transfer method) for page 31 fourth, and go back and make tick marks on each page for approximately where we enter a new Ocean Zone (amazing that when you arrive at the Trench you are looking at the staples at the center of the book, with so much depth to go!)

Then, finally, she can research and draw in different animals, placing them where they go.

I'm looking forward to this and I'm going to make my own book too! I'd be happy to photograph it and share it here. We are working remotely through Zoom, and I'll have to make my own at the same time as she works on hers, so that I can help answer questions. I think the Calendars were fun as a gift, but an MLB that you can easily look back through is probably the best way to present this information and to really work in-depth with the scale.

the blank calendars we used

some photos of our calendar artwork
and the Expo

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