Floating Classrooms with Belen Jesuit Preparatory School for Junior Outreach Day
DISCOVERY YACHT River Queen
Miami, Florida
February 22-23, 2024
Overview
On Thursday, February 22, and Friday, February 23, 2024, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted floating classrooms and coastal cleanups for two groups of juniors from Belen Jesuit Preparatory School as a part of their week of local service. Between the two trips, we hosted 53 students and 4 educators 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 Belen students to Sandspur Island, a local, man-made picnic island in the Bay, and had beach cleanups where we enthusiastically collected over 90.4 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 juniors of Belen Jesuit were such 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. 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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