Student Update May 13, 2013

On Saturday, we had classes in the morning, and enjoyed some fun activities in the afternoon like deep-sea fishing, free diving, and making a bottle wall. That night, all of Island School Spring ’13 was reunited! K3 and K4 came home from their trips, marking the end of kayak rotations. It was a little overwhelming to suddenly go from 12 girls in the dorm to 24, but after the hugging and screaming frenzy was over, everyone had a really nice time catching up with friends about the past week. At dinner circle, I looked around at our big complete circle, heard the count off end at 48, and I couldn’t help but smiling. I didn’t realize how much I missed our whole community and I felt a real sense of love for it at that moment. After dinner that night, we had a fun game of sardines followed by delicious ice cream sundaes and an outdoor movie screening of National Treasure. The next day was Sunday, and everyone enjoyed a well-deserved day off. In the spirit of Mother’s Day, we let the kitchen ladies have the day off and a bunch of students helped Scotty and Taylor cook brunch for everyone. We did this on Easter, too, because we feel the kitchen ladies deserve it and we always have a blast cooking anyways.

All the students had a nice time getting five minutes to call home for Mother’s Day. To all the moms reading this: thank you for having the courage to send your kids here, for raising these wonderful students that I spend every day with, and for giving us the opportunity of a lifetime. I promise you will love what we will bring back home. We love you!

The rest of the Sunday was filled with exploration and cooking dinner for those who wanted to help out. In study hours we got some work done, read Omeros, did some research, and started to outline our analytical essays that are due to wrap up our tourism unit. This morning we woke up and went for a run-swim, which we haven’t done in a while. My group swam through current cut (against the current!) and had a great workout. Today consists of research and brainstorming for our final Human Eco projects!