Yesterday morning I started my day off in Water Polo cut doing some swimming drills with our coach Scottie.  He told us we were halfway done with our swim track, which means the super swim is getting closer everyday! We did some work on our strokes to make sure we were swimming efficiently, and finished with some all out sprints.  Swimming back the sun was rising over the trees and created a beautiful array of colors in the sky.

After a wonderful breakfast of French toast from Mooch, I headed out to Sunset Beach to complete an art project with my partner Read.  This week we have been learning about the artist Andy Goldsworthy who makes art out of the natural elements around him.  He works very patiently and delicately to make pieces of art out of stone, wood, ice, leaves, and other surrounding materials.  In class, Nadine and Maria introduced us to the idea of representing your sense of place through art and through this project. So Read and I decided to make a circular stone structure underwater. We choose to work with water because of the importance of it here at The Island School, and the circle construction was inspired from works of Andy Goldsworhty. We collected rounded stones from the beach and swam them off shore to a sandy spot about 10-15 underwater.  Documenting the whole thing, we swam down to the bottom and placed the stones in a circle.  As soon as we laid the first rocks down, juvenile parrotfish started circling the rocks and decided to treat it as their new home.  By the end they were almost territorial of the rocks! We spent about an hour an half working on our art project and finished with a three-story layered circle of rocks! We then said goodbye to the rocks and parrotfish, wondering how long the installation would stay in place.

After lunch, was community outreach time so we headed to The Deep Creek Middle School to meet up with our buddies for the second time. We reunited in our focus groups and played an icebreaker to loosen everyone up.  We then discussed how we were going to move forward with the project.  In each group there are older students who lead the projects so they facilitated the meeting.  I am in the plastics group and we talked about how to bring awareness of the pressing issue of the presence of plastic in the surrounding settlements.  We decided we are going to make a video to share online with the different communities, that displays facts about plastic consumption and the work that, we the students, will complete. In the following weeks our group will go to local beaches around South Eleuthera with Krystal to survey how much plastic is on a beach! I am looking forward to spending time with my buddy outside of the classroom, while helping bring awareness to the issue of plastic!