This activity ties together spring tides, neap tides, moon phases, chart reading skills, graphing skills, and analyzing data skills. When making the worksheets, I used the data for high tides since it showed a better range of data for the students to create the graph.
Objectives: students will be able to graph tidal heights and observe their relationship to moon phases
Lesson Materials:
- Tides Notes – review or introduction to tides (blog entry)
- Guided Graphing
- Atlantic City, NJ – January 2015 High Tide Data worksheet (pdf)
- Seaside Heights, NJ – February 2015 High Tide Data (pdf)
- Blank Worksheet & Graph – add your own location (pdf)
- Template for Tide data collection – High and Low tides – more advanced (Google Doc)
- Template for Graphing – (Google Doc)
- Tide charts – select the state and city of your choice, example is set for Atlantic City
- Current Moon Phases – NASA website
- Tides – NASA
- Below is a fantastic video from Ted Ed on tides
This activity was also a good review on how to create line graphs by hand for two sets of data. Students are used to making bar graphs so we reviewed how to set up line graphs and plot points on the graph.
When plotting the data, you can really see the differences in the tidal heights. We also used the phrase “Neap ain’t that deep” to remember the difference between spring tides and neap tides.
updated 4/27/25
Middle School Science Lessons 
Comments are welcome!