Gates Mills Day 01: Diving In

Day 1! Wahooo!!!

We started off the day bombarding Mr. Cawley and Ms. Swain with a ton of questions about the Island School but were met with the response, “great question, but we will have time for questions later.” Then, we promptly got to work researching our spirit animals, that had been assigned during the rotation. With some research, we each created our own mini posters with a drawing of our animal and some interesting details about the animal (coral is an animal!). Once we finished our individual posters, we taped them to the wall to create the masterpiece seen below - a food web.

We connected each animal together to show the relationship down the trophic system/food chain. Finally, we all presented our Spirit Animals to the class. 

Thanks to Ally for making this beautiful sign! It’s hanging up in the front of the classroom. 

After we finished presenting our animals, we had time for an anonymous question and answer to cover all of the questions that we had at the beginning of class. The questions ranged from showering to scuba diving to travel, which were all very helpful to know about.

Then, out of the blue, we had a special guest appearance: Ms. Bischoff. She talked to us about how we need to stay ahead of our college processes and that we should NOT check our college application status until we are home, so we don’t scare anyone in the airport.

Our last activity was researching as many overarching problems in the Bahamas as we could find, then writing them down on sticky notes. We took all of our ideas and put them into categories on the board.

We had to research these ideas for our final project, which is to select a current issue in the Bahamas and propose a plan to solve it. The main topics are Lionfish, Coral, Garbage, Tourism, and Turtles. We got our teams for the final project and will eventually start working on it.

Overall, a very exciting first day back from break! I know that everyone in the room is so excited for the next 3 weeks because we are all in this together, and all we have to do is “trust the process”. Plus, it’s almost one week until we leave!

Looking forward,

Christian and Hannah