Floating Classroom with West Miami Middle School

DISCOVERY YACHT River Queen
Miami, Florida
March 8, 2024

Overview

On Friday, March 8th, 2024, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted a floating classroom and coastal cleanup for 15 students and 4 educators from West Miami Middle School 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. 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 West Miami Middle students to Sandspur Island, a local, man-made picnic island in the Bay, and had a beach cleanup where we enthusiastically collected over 22 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

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 West Miami Middle School again in the future and to see some of these students at our bi-weekly coastal cleanups in Miami!


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