Floating Classroom with Belen Jesuit Educators for Employee Service Day
DISCOVERY YACHT River Queen
Miami, Florida
March 15, 2024
Overview
On Friday, March 15th, 2024, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted a floating classroom and coastal cleanup in partnership with Plastic Fisherman for a group of 24 educators from Belen Jesuit Preparatory School aboard DISCOVERY Yacht River Queen in our beloved Biscayne Bay as a part of their day of local community service. We met our educators at Bill Bird Marina and made our way through Biscayne Bay to the mouth of Oleta River while discussing how the local watershed functions and results in different types of pollution in the bay. Using Earth Echo water challenge kits, Belen educators had the opportunity to get their hands on some real science by measuring water quality parameters temperature, turbidity, pH, and dissolved oxygen level and hypothesizing why these parameters may change throughout the Bay. Following our water quality testing and watershed discussions, we brought the Belen teachers to Sandspur Island, a local, man-made picnic island in the Bay, and had a coastal cleanup where we enthusiastically collected over 36 pounds of trash and made sightings of local wildlife like dolphins, pelicans, and barracuda throughout the shoreline. With the trash collected, we also worked with Rodrigo from Plastic Fisherman to create a plastic fish that helps create global awareness around the issue of marine debris and "plastic fishing." We finished up our floating classroom by identifying the most common (and uncommon) types of trash we found and how we could prevent those types of materials from entering the environment as a result of our everyday choices.
Outing Goal
The educators of Belen Jesuit were such a pleasure to work with and we are happy to be able to work with groups of local teachers out on the water with the invaluable help of our DISCOVERY Yacht River Queen. We hope that these educators were able to leave the floating classroom with a better understanding of how pollution impacts our waterways and how we can prevent different types of pollution in our everyday lives. We had such a great time and hope to continue our strong education and outreach partnership with the wonderful students and teachers of Belen Jesuit Preparatory School!
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