Teach Your Kids to Clean the Ocean

How do you teach your children to love and respect the ocean? How can you teach young children the importance of the ocean to our survival on Earth? How can you teach them the devastating effects of ocean pollution on marine life? How can you teach them all of these lessons without scaring or traumatizing young children with the ugly images of ocean pollution and the devastation on marine life?

Kids need to understand what polluting the ocean does to the environment and that there are consequences to their actions when they visit the beach. Sadly, horrific images of what is happening to the oceans may do little to inspire kids. They have too many video games with gruesome images and after a while, these don’t have much of an impact on them. They become desensitized.

Thankfully, there are many resources online to help parents and educators provide kid friendly lessons to children that will inspire a love and respect of the ocean and its inhabitants while teaching them how to help preserve our oceans. Here are a few of the links I have found:

• 1,2,3, Who’s Cleaning the Sea? helps children understand the role we play in ocean pollution and how each one of us can help to make things better. Inspired by powerful, kid-friendly visuals of ocean pollution, this book will teach your child not only numbers and how to count but also the importance of taking care of our environment. Children will love learning how little changes they make can protect our planet. Written for children 2-6 years old.

• Ocean Pollution Clean Up Science Activity – This can be modified for different ages (5-12)-Ocean Pollution Clean Up Science Activity ⋆ Parenting Chaos

• Explore Ocean Pollution Further with Your Child – from https://parentingchaos.com/ -

Some favorite resources to explore ocean pollution more in depth are:

· Kids Take Action Against Ocean Plastic by National Geographic

· Plastic! Ahoy: Investigating the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

· National Geographic Kids: Ocean Plastic

· The Life Cycle of a Plastic Bottle by TedED

· All The Way to the Ocean by Freedom Three Publishing

Education and leading by example are our best hope for a cleaner future for our oceans. Everyone has a part to play.