Floating Classroom with Belen Jesuit Middle School Fishing Club
DISCOVERY YACHT River Queen
Miami, Florida
April 10, 2024
Overview
On Wednesday, April 10th, 2024, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted a floating classroom and coastal cleanup for 30 middle school students and 3 educators from the Belen Jesuit Middle School Fishing Club aboard DISCOVERY Yacht River Queen in our beloved Biscayne Bay. We met our students and chaperones 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, with a special focus on the impacts made by fishers. Using Earth Echo water challenge kits, students and chaperones 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 students to Sandspur Island, a local, man-made picnic island in the Bay, and had beach cleanups where we enthusiastically collected over 40 pounds of trash and made sightings of local wildlife throughout the shoreline. 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 students of Belen Jesuit Middle School Fishing Club were a pleasure to work with and we are happy to be able to take another group of local students out on the water with the invaluable help of our DISCOVERY Yacht River Queen. In addition to information given to them earlier this year through a coastal habitats presentation, We hope that these students 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 host Belen Jesuit again in the future and to see some of these students at our bi-weekly coastal cleanups in Miami!
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