Floating Classroom with West Miami Middle School

Overview

On Friday, February 24th, 2023, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted our second floating classroom of 2023! For this trip we hosted a group of 23 students from West Miami Middle School aboard DISCOVERY Yacht River Queen. We met our students and chaperones at Pelican Harbor Marina, where we were greeted by a pod of dolphins, and made our way down Biscayne Bay to the mouth of Little River while discussing how the local watershed functions and results in different types of pollution in the bay. Our students from West Miami Middle were excited to discuss the impacts urban areas have on adjacent waterways, and were even rewarded by sighting some local seabird species including cormorants and egrets! Using EarthEcho 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. That’s not all - in typical SeaKeepers style we had a small beach cleanup on Pelican Island, where we enthusiastically collected 55 pounds of trash, and made sightings of a spotted eagle ray, a spotted sea hare, and an upside-down jellyfish on 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. The students of West Miami Middle School were a pleasure to work with and we are happy to be able to take another group of local Title 1 students out on the water with the invaluable help of our DISCOVERY Yacht River Queen. 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 again in the future!