Caring for Animals - Coral Reef Habitat & Marine Pollution

Marine pollution is a serious threat to the ecosystem of the animals, coral reefs and other living organisms in the ocean. It is a growing concern and serious problem and many people are oblivious to what is going on beneath the waters, far away from our land. To teach the children about marine pollution, we first introduced to them the ocean’s coral reef habitat.

Coral reefs are home to many fishes and act as a ‘hotel’ where fishes stop by to stay for awhile and move on to their next destination. They are an important ecosystem for many sea creatures.  We tasked the children to come together to build a coral reef habitat inside a recycled cardboard box. We took two sessions to build the coral reef habitat and one session to teach about marine pollution.

Painting the box using blue paint

Colouring the corals and sea creatures

Taking turns to add their corals and sea creatures to the coral reef habitat.

Completed our coral reef habitat on the second session!

Marine pollution

Marine pollution is poisoning every living creature in the ocean, dirtying their waters, being mistaken as food, trapping sea creatures, and more. We showed how bad marine pollution is at our own Singapore shores, by showing the amount of rubbish collected by volunteers from Seven Clean Seas, an organisation who do regular beach clean ups at local beaches such as Sembawang beach.

Our final activity was to encourage the children to help pick up rubbish if they find them near the shores or in the water as if left alone they would harm the animals living in the ocean. We reenact the marine pollution situation by  scattering plastics and papers all over the corals and tangled them on the sea creatures. They then took turns to pick up and throw the rubbish properly into the bin, making sure they would not fly and land into drains and eventually into the sea.

Now we have a beautiful and healthy environment for the corals and sea creatures again! If we love the animals in the sea, we must save the ocean. Remember to dispose our rubbish properly and use less plastics!