Hello everyone! This is Morgen writing again. We had another great day here in Eleuthera. Many students, including myself, endured in a very choppy scuba dive yesterday morning for Marine Ecology class. This week we focused on identifying species in and around our assigned coral reef patch we have been looking at for the past few weeks. The addition of large waves made this a very fun and thrilling dive!

Yesterday afternoon, we headed over to Deep Creek Middle School for community outreach. After picking up our buddies, my group (7^th grade), headed back to the Island School to our farm to collect soil for the garden we have been working on over in Wemyss Bight. Next week, we will lay down the soil to hopefully start planting soon. It’s been so much fun getting to know the Deep Creek students. The highlight of my day was singing various pop songs with my buddy and her friends during the van rides to various locations. We then traveled back to the middle school for extended advisory period and wrote letters to our buddies favorite celebrities. They are certainly hopeful that they will write back! After CO, we all broke off with our advisor groups and dispersed across Eleuthera. Many groups went snorkeling, some wrote poetry, and some just indulged, including mine. No matter the activity, advisory time proves to consistently be a highlight of everyone’s weeks.

Its been really fun to have new faces on campus these last few days as members of the Island School Alumni Board have trickled in to stay for the week. A lot of us have found mutual friends with them, so it’s been great to make some new connections. They joined us at morning circle today, a little more eager for the second timed run swim as us. Students were really pushing themselves this morning and it was awesome to see so many of us breaking our times from two weeks ago. The love and support of the community standing around the flagpole cheering as we finish is by far my favorite part of morning exercise.

We are all anxiously pushing our way through these next two days of classes, as we look forward to Saturday night where we will have our first coffee house. Students are urged to perform whatever they would like, talent or not. Updates on unknown talents to come. It has been a great week here, and a huge shout out to the kitchen staff for making countless cakes for all of the birthdays we have had lately!

Hello all, I’m Morgen Montgomery and I will be writing the blog post today. As another school week quickly comes to a close, there are many things to be caught up on. To all of the parents, most of you have probably received an anxious phone call from a child regarding research presentations. We have been working hard all week to perfect our research PowerPoint’s and presentations that will be given to our fellow classmates, teachers, and CEI leaders this coming Monday. These will be our first big presentations, so wish your child luck!

Research has played a large role in all of our lives this week. As I walked around campus yesterday afternoon, I came across many eager researchers fully entrenched in their projects. After a bit of complication, the students in deep water sharks picked up the medusa, while students in long lining sharks pulled in a 7-foot Nurse Shark just a few hundred feet away.

In other news, boys enjoyed a nice, well-deserved sleep in yesterday or an early morning free dive, while girls woke up before sunrise to start our first “deep clean” of the dorms. This was very much needed, and all of the complaints stopped once the large accumulation of miscellaneous objects and trash was witnessed by all of the girls, realizing we should probably be a little neater! While we swept, washed, and sprayed, a large group of boys took the gutsy plunge in Ike’s reef, another free-diving location, where many of them made it through the 15-yard tunnel.

Later today, we will join our buddies at Deep Creek Middle School and begin our Community Outreach projects. This seems to be a favorite day for everyone, which is then followed by advisor time, where students get to relax and indulge. Everything is great here, including a beautiful week of weather.

by Harrison Rohrer

We just got back from a massive capture the flag game, which spanned all the way from campus to triangle cut half a mile away. Swimming and running to tag opposing players while still trying to listen for my own teammates coming with the flag proved to be extremely difficult on such a large area, which is probably why the caciques (student leaders) were allowed to organize this event as our morning exercise. Yesterday was our free day, so after a long night of music and dancing on Saturday most of us slept in for a while. When I woke up, I joined a group of guys heading out to the Conch House, a local restaurant where we ordered stacks of pancakes and bacon. Having eaten like kings, we all biked to the current cut, which was flooding at the time and provided an awesome lazy-river snorkel to get the morning going. We headed back  and finished up some homework before going to brunch, only a few hours after breakfast. After eating, the boys had a dorm bonding afternoon with our faculty dorm head, Peter, where we all made teams of two and competed in many sports and activities to determine a victorious pair. I happened to be with Peter. We competed in ping pong, polo (using tennis rackets and an orange), bocce, and fruit ninja, winning each match except for bocce. When that was done, I went snorkeling to capture some fish for the dining hall aquarium. The nets were really hard to maneuver underwater, so CJ and I were only able to catch two fish, a fairy basslet and a bluehead wrasse. On my way out I picked up a west-indian sea egg because our fish count was so poor. I came back for dinner, and then went to presentation on seahorse research in Florida and the Bahamas. What a free day!

by Sam Jensen

Today we started the day off with some early morning yoga or waterpolo, depending on your choice. I chose yoga, a relaxing class taught by Brady in the presentation room. After the class, everyone felt relaxed, rejuvenated, and ready for the day. It was a Friday, the day we change caciques (leaders for the week), I had been a cacique for the previous week, and Brady invited the five of us to her apartment for a final breakfast as a group. We made omelet’s and coffee cake together, and wrote our passing on speech to the next student who we decide would make a great leader for the upcoming week. After that delicious treat of breakfast, we made our way to the community meeting. At these meetings we get together as a entire community and discuss things that will help benefit everyone as a whole. In this particular meeting, we did the cacique pass off and did a activity about different kinds of leaders, what kinds we personally are, and how we need a diversity of leaders in a group to be successful. We answered some questions, which put us in certain groups: the driver, the motivator, the annalist, and the relationship builder. We learned about the positive and negative aspects of each type of leader, and how without each type of leader a society can’t function. It was cool to see who else was in my leader group, and this knowledge helped me better understand the group dynamic. After the community meeting, we broke off into our research groups for a 2-hour research class. I am in the lobster displacement group. In this class period, we had a discussion about the scientific paper we were assigned to read, we had a short pop quiz, and we went to the wet lab to begin setting up our experiment. Lunch followed research, and human ecology followed lunch. In this class, we talked about different types of plants around us, and how they help out the eco-system. We then went around and tested different water sources around campus: the well, the cistern, and the ocean. We tested salinity, ph, temperature, and conductivity. It was interesting to see what levels of what was in the water we were drinking. We then broke off into groups of 3 and had one hour to make a water filter. We searched the school for materials. We went to the beach, the resource center, the farm, and around all the classrooms. We found bits and pieces of things to use, and we found that natural materials seemed to work better. After this, we tested the levels in our water and compared it to the other water we tested. After this class, we had exploration time. Most of us biked to sunset beach, a beautiful beach about a mile away. It was a perfect way to relax and hang out with our friends. Everyone met again at dinner circle, had dinner together, and then went to our night class. We don’t have night classes every night, but tonight ours was about the use of plastic and how it can affect so many natural ecosystems and animals. It was eye-opening and inspirational. Those two words can represent more than the night class though, it can represent our entire Island School experiences we’ve had in just these short 4 weeks.