For the first time, the Marine Conservation Society’s (MCS) education team will be offering live webinar sessions in addition to education tools and resources available online for groups, schools and individuals at home.

The webinar sessions will focus on recycling, plastic waste, and marine conservation more broadly. By offering engaging webinar sessions, live lessons and offline resources to download, young people can learn more about the state of our seas from the safety of their homes.

Jenny Griffiths, Education Programme Manager at MCS says: “We’re really pleased to now be able to offer a series of engaging online webinars which can keep young people entertained and educated during these uncertain times. Our ocean education resources are available for everyone to use, from teachers looking to provide support to their classes from afar, to parents and guardians hoping to keep children occupied! We at MCS have long believed that ocean literacy should be a key part of the national curriculum, with these resources we hope to show the incredible value in education the next generation about the ocean and the issues it faces.”

The MCS Cool Seas Explorers website has a wealth of resources for different age groups, with educational games, quizzes, creative activities, image galleries and more, to help with home learning. Downloadable PDF resources and lesson plans which focus on different topics in more detail are also available.

Some of the amazing ocean resources available online:

–          Amazing UK seas (ages 5-11)

This topic looks at all the really important processes our cooler temperature UK seas allow for, including learning about our vital kelp forests and seagrass meadows which are habitats for many different creatures. In this section you can find some brilliant resources and lesson plans, covering rare and threatened species, Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), and how we can all help our ocean.

–          Marine litter (ages 5-11)

This topic explores how litter and waste finds its way onto UK beaches and what we can do to help prevent it polluting our coastline. Find games, galleries, lesson plans and documents in this section for more information on ocean plastics. A detailed Unflushables lesson plan is also available to download as part of the Cool Seas Investigators programme, which is aimed at secondary school students.

–          Marine industries (ages 7-11)

This can be used to teach older children about the different industries which utilise our seas, including fisheries, oil rigs, ports and shipping, and offshore renewable energy sources. There’s a Tetris-style game based on a shipping container’s cargo, a gallery of images of different industrial apparatus, and downloadable resources to use at home.

–          Encounter Edu

The team at Encounter Edu have a fantastic programme of live lessons scheduled which allow children to hear from experts in their field streamed live on location, a fantastic addition to your home learning schedule! The AXA Arctic Live 2020 event is also running from 4-15th May 2020, where there will be live lessons streaming from the UK’s Arctic Research Station on Svalbard. The first week of lessons will focus on life and work in the Arctic, and the second on exploring the conservation issues the environment is facing there.

All of these resources and sessions are available for groups, schools, or individuals at home to join in with, as a fun and interactive way of learning more about our ocean. If you are interested in booking one of these live sessions please email the team at education@mcsuk.org to find out more.

For more information, please join MCS’s UK Ocean Schools Resource Hub on Facebook, where members share useful marine education resources they’ve come across online.