Our Programs

Ocean Camp – Connect. Explore. Protect.

At Ocean Ambassadors, we believe that we protect what we love — and to love something, we first need to feel connected to it.

Our Ocean Camp program gets students out of the classroom and down to the beach, where learning comes alive through exploration, play, and discovery. With their feet in the sand and water, students investigate the shoreline ecosystem through guided inquiry and hands-on science. They wade into the intertidal zone, observing biodiversity, seaweeds, and the fascinating adaptations of marine animals that allow them to thrive.

Through hands-on fieldwork, students measure salinity, temperature, turbidity, pH, and ammonia levels — discovering how these factors influence the ocean environment and the life it supports. They learn how shoreline development, pollution, and climate change are affecting ocean health, both locally and globally. As they make connections between science and stewardship, students are encouraged to reflect on how their individual choices can make a difference. Time to simply enjoy the beach — to skip rocks, explore tidepools, and play — deepens their emotional connection to the ocean as something worth protecting.

An important part of Ocean Camp is learning from First Peoples’ concepts of interconnectedness and respect for all living things. Students explore how Indigenous knowledge systems emphasize balance, reciprocity, and responsibility in caring for the environment. By blending traditional wisdom with scientific inquiry, Ocean Camp helps students see how everything is connected — and that they, too, are part of the story.

Each Ocean Camp experience empowers students to take meaningful action. As young Ocean Ambassadors, they return to their schools inspired to launch their own initiatives — from designing classroom presentations to organizing beach cleanups or local awareness campaigns. Our team supports their ideas and projects every step of the way, helping students turn inspiration into action.

Because when students connect with the ocean, they begin a lifelong journey:
connection → love → protection.

The Ocean Camp workshops link to the BC Curriculum focus on flexible learning environments and developing a sense of place. Our materials correlate to the BC Curriculum “Big Ideas” in Science and Social Studies and support the core competencies of social responsibility, personal awareness and responsibility, critical and creative thinking, and communication.

For more information and to book, please email Sari at admin@oceanambassadorscanada.org

Instructor/Student Ratios:
Our instructor-to-student ratio is 1:10 for our Ocean Camp program.

Parent volunteers are not required.

Length: 4 hours
Cost: $32 per student
Minimum: 20 students

Outline for the day:

*Students are divided into 3 groups, each group participating in 3 workshops. Workshops for each grade are curriculum-based.

Examples of workshops:

• Ocean health inquiry
  • Students measure salinity, temperature, turbidity, pH and ammonia levels of the ocean. Students discuss how these factors are changing with climate change and the impact on life in the ocean, locally and globally. Students discuss what can be done to slow the changes we are witnessing.

• First People’s Concepts of Interconnectedness in the environment
  • Students listen to the Sockeye Mother by Hetxw’ms Gyetxw (Brett D. Huson). We discuss the worldview of the First Peoples that everything in the environment is linked. We consider how viewing all aspects of the natural world as your relatives demands a respectful and caring approach to the use of resources. Students think about their connections with their families, other people, plants, animals and natural spaces and play a web of life game demonstrating interconnectedness.

• Animals and adaptations
  • Students participate in an experiment to measure differences in biodiversity at different levels of the intertidal zone. We discuss how biodiversity is being affected by climate change and predict changes to our local marine life in the future.

• Environmental Stewardship – The future is you: Who are the stakeholders?  
  • We explore the concept of environmental stewardship, the threats to local and global ocean health,  and the need for interconnectivity between industries, communities, and the marine environment. Students are challenged to think creatively about actions that they can take to make a change and to create and implement an action plan with the support of the Ocean Ambassadors team.

• The science of seaweed
  • We discuss how seaweed and other ocean resources have been used by first peoples. We collect red, green and brown algae from the intertidal zone and learn about the anatomy of kelp and other common algae. Students discover adaptations that help kelp and other seaweeds survive in its turbulent environment, how animals and humans use seaweed, and how they are threatened. Students discuss the role of seaweed in climate change.

• Development of our local shoreline and effects on ocean health – human impacts on ocean health, local and global.  
  • We walk the shoreline and discuss the geology, ecology and history of the area. We discuss how development has affected biodiversity and ocean dynamics including erosion and sediment deposits. We discuss how climate change is affecting our shorelines and what is being done to mitigate risks.