The Great Bay Discovery Center offers a range of opportunities for your class to discover the Bay's rich and diverse natural history. This program is offered to visiting school groups in May and June. Each field trip includes the following activities:

Habitat Discovery Walk

What furry predators hunt in Great Bay salt marshes? How is an estuary like a restaurant? What is a wetland and how do you find one? This guided hands-on and senses tuned-in investigative activity using the Great Bay Discovery Center trail will help your students discover the answers to these questions and more! Get ready to become a "nature sleuth" as you and your students explore trail, discovering the major upland and wetland habitats along the way.

Waterfront Exploration

Did you see the amphipods jump, crab crawl away and mudsnail meander?  Find these animals and more as your students enjoy a guided exploration of the waterfront at the Center.

Discovery Tank

Students gather around the discovery tank and hold live estuarine animals such as horseshoe crabs, green crabs and lobsters.

Horseshoe Crabbing Around

Have you ever seen a horseshoe crab with an elementary school student inside of it? Well you will at the Great Bay Discovery Center! Student volunteers will have the chance to dress in costume as a horseshoe crab. Together with the rest of the class they will help to discover how horseshoe crabs survive in the estuary. Your students will get to know this incredible "living fossil" by observing what this animal looks like, where it lives, what it eats, how it interacts with humans, and more!

Great Bay Treasures

Can animals live in all of those 2000 feet of mud flats that we see at low tide around the Great Bay Discovery Center? Is Salt Marsh Peat a person? What plants and animals can you find in the deeper waters of Great Bay? Let's poke around in some bay bottom mud, look at a salt marsh, and explore a Great Bay touch tank and find out! Students will take a look at some fascinating Great Bay creatures in this hands-on activity. We will uncover the hidden plants and animals found in and around Great Bay and explore their adaptations for survival in the estuarine environment!