Create your own ocean zones in a jar to explore habitat, sea animals & deep sea creatures.
We’ve been enjoying some fun books about the ocean and marine animals this summer. My kids have always been big fans of sea life.
There are so many wonderful creatures that live in the oceans and did you know that so much of the underwater world is still undiscovered?!
So we decided to make our own model of the ocean in order to explore the different ocean layers and the animals that live in these areas.
Ocean Habitat Project: Zones, Sea Life & Deep Sea Creatures
This is such a fun and hands-on project for kids — they’ll love helping to put it all together!
I’ve included a detailed tutorial on how we put ours together along with affiliate links to some of the products we used to create our own ocean world.
We first read the book Wish for a Fish: All About Sea Creatures (Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library) to learn more about the various zones of the ocean. The book also introduces a variety of animals that live in each zone.
A great book we’d recommend that discuss ocean zones is the Ocean: A Visual Encyclopedia
When you create your ocean container, it won’t be able to hold ALL of the animals you’d like to put in it.
One of the lessons kids will quickly gleen from this activity is that most of the marine life live primarily in two ocean zones (in fact, our sunny zone got crowded very quickly).
This is a wonderful discussion and learning experience but the kids will also need to choose which animals they would like to include in their underwater world.
Project Materials for your Ocean Habitat Jar:
• (1) large plastic container with a wide neck
• (5) different colors of Blue Cardstock Paper
• (1) Toob of Sea Animals — one type would be the Safari Ltd Ocean Toob 
• blue string or thread
• tape
• water
They also make a Safari Ltd. Deep Sea Creatures 
Identify Five Ocean Zones or Layers
First, overlay the different colors of blue paper from lightest to darkest so that they can cover half of your container from top to bottom. Each of these colors/layers will represent one of the ocean zones.
The 5 different ocean zones include:
- Sunny Zone
- Twilight Zone
- Dark Zone
- Abyss
- Trench
Related Activity: Draw a Life-size Whale
The next step is to have the kids use the Stickers of Ocean Animals to decorate the paper — place the marine animals in their correct zones. We used the book to help remind us which animals might live in different areas.
For example, we decided to use our seaweed-looking stickers as Tube Worms, deep sea creatures that are found in the trench zone. Most of the stickers will be placed in the sunny zone.
Once decorated, you can attach the papers to the OUTSIDE of your container using tape. Trim the ends as needed.
Sea Animal Habitats Ocean Project
Next we’ll put in the plastic marine animals from our Safari Ltd Ocean Animals Toob .
Choose a few of the animals and tie a string/thread around each one. We used the dolphin, whale, eel and octopus for ours.
Then cut the thread at the appropriate length so when it’s taped to the top of the container, each animal will hang in the correct zone.
You can see that our dolphin stays in the sunny zone, the whale resides in the twilight and dark zones and the eel is the lowest in the dark zone.
Our Abyss has some stickers of sea tubes but there’s not much that hangs out waaaayyy down there 😉
The last step is the most fun — fill the container with water!
This not only makes the inside of the container look like a ‘real’ ocean but it also acts as a magnifier for the animals, stickers and labeling. The water also helps the animals to ‘swim’ around in their new home 🙂
There are more creative ways to explore the zones of the ocean too:
We LOVE the Melissa & Doug Under The Sea – 100 Piece Floor Puzzle
And one book series that’s always a go-to resource when studying habitats are the DK books as they have amazing photography! DK Eyewitness Books: Ocean
More Ocean Activities:
Draw a Life-size Whale: Math & Science Fun
Layers of the Ocean: A STEM Project for Kids
