Exploring The Coral Reef

You can click on any of the book covers in the launcher graphic above to jump to screenshots from that book and a brief description of it. You can also access that information by scrolling down this page. After each description, you can click a link to return here and try another title. This unit is included in both Ecosystems Collection B and the full Wonders and Magic of Nature collection.

The anchor book for the unit, Coral Reefs, explains that the reef is created by simple animals, the coral polyps. On this page a pop-up grid can be opened by students to display a diagram showing the structure of one polyp.

The student then has the opportunity to read about how the actual reef structure is made up of both live corals and the corals that have died, providing places for other animals and plants to live. The book goes on to introduce students to the rich diversity of life that makes the coral reef one of the richest of the biomes.

This book follows the anchor book, and provides students an opportunity to show their comprehension of the subject through a series of multiple choice questions.

Each set of three questions is preceded by a photograph originally seen in the anchor book, such as this one of the tiny peppermint shrimp, to jog the students' memories and make this exercise more than a simple drill.

After completing the introduction to the coral reef in the anchor book, students have the background knowledge to understand more specific related topics. In this follow-on book, they focus in on one of the animals that hides in the reef, the octopus.

Spectacular close-up photos illustrate the features of this strange animal, the most intelligent of the invertebrates. One photo challenges students to find an octopus that has camouflaged itself to blend in with its surroundings.

Notice the vocabulary button, which students can use to open a pop-up grid with words relating to the octopus that may not be familiar to them. Clicking a word plays an audible definition.

Octopus Journal is the follow-on activity for Octopus. Photos from the Octopus book remind students of the important points about the octopus. The page following each photo has a question to answer in Clicker Writer.

Students can open the unit vocabulary wordbank while they are answering these questions, and insert words relating to the octopus if they need this writing support.

After learning about the coral reef and the octopus, students get a chance to explore the coral reef during a virtual scuba dive. This book utilizes the choose your adventure format and gives students an opportunity to explore underwater at their own pace. There are eight different paths through the story, and students observe a variety of animals in and around the reef.

Videos of animals ranging from tiny sea horses to a great white shark make this a vivid experience for the explorers. They are encouraged to take notes as they travel so that they can later write about their adventure.

After students complete the scuba adventure, they next create a finished journal about their dive. A pop-up grid with underwater photos from the adventure enables students to insert one photo on each page of the journal.

They then write about what they saw as they explored the coral reef, using the photos to organize their observations. The finished journal is saved and also can be printed.

The final lesson in the unit asks students to sort vocabulary words that they have learned in this unit from words they have encountered in another unit.

In "Exploring the Coral Reef", students sort words relating to the reef and words from the savanna unit. In this screen shot, the pop-up grid with all the words is open, and a student is preparing find and click words associated with coral reefs to insert them into the appropriate cell.