Classroom Visit with Dante B. Fascell Elementary School

Overview

On the morning of January 22nd, 2025, the International SeaKeepers Society hosted a lesson on a wide and diverse range of marine science topics with sixty 4th and 5th grade students of Dante B. Fascell Elementary School in Miami, Florida. To start us off, our Educational Outreach Associate, Jack, led an interactive presentation and discussion centered on coastal ecosystems and their unique trophic ecology with emphasis placed on the importance and uniqueness of apex predators. Students were welcome and encouraged to share their thoughts and ask plenty of questions, yielding a back-and-forth discussion on many complex topics throughout the talk. Following our discussion, students participated in a trivia game to test what they had learned. Our students showed great enthusiasm and performed extremely well, barely missing any questions at all! Following the game, students took a break for lunch while our team set up our Enviroscapes Dynamic Watershed Table to teach a lesson on the various types of pollution as well as model how our local watershed and its food web are hindered by them. Once again, our students proved to be experts, pinpointing many of the causes and sources of pollution that affect our South Florida waterways. We finished the day with a wrap-up discussion of everything we covered and took the chance to answer final questions. We had an amazing time with the students and educators of Dante B. Fascell, and hope to see them at some of our future SeaKeepers events as well as work with them again soon.