Tybee Island - Tuesday
We are busy into our 3rd day at Burton’s 4H Center here on Tybee Island. We turned our lights out at 10:30 pm last night, and our students certainly slept a little longer after a VERY long day yesterday. Like yesterday, photos from today will be posted to our Facebook page later tonight. Here is a rundown of the things we have done today.
Before and after meals, our kids have some free time to play basketball, 4-square, volleyball, tetherball, and/or the ever-popular gaga pit. After breakfast, we headed to the beach for a class called “Choosies.” This is the least structured class they have. Students were able to do a beach walk to look for shells and shark teeth, build sandcastles, throw football or frisbees, make jewelry, or just relax. Mr. Grissar did work in a short practice for our lacrosse team during this time. They enjoyed getting to play in the sand.
After Choosies, we came back for lunch, had a small amount of free time, and then headed back out to the beach for a class called Surf Sleuth (with Siene Nets). Like most outdoor classes here, this class began in one of their classrooms with some general knowledge about the fish we be hoping to catch as well as the “how to” of rigging fish nets. They learned about the different roles needed to operate the fish nets correctly. We then loaded up and headed out for the students to give it a try. It took several tries for our groups to get the hang of it, but each group started catching various types of fish, crabs, and shrimp. We were also blessed to have a pod of dolphins that started swimming right behind us for about 20 minutes.
We came back and had snack time (THANK YOU, parents) and then had our second dissection of the week - the Dogfish Shark. Students had a lesson on the anatomy of sharks and learned all kinds of facts about them before partnering up and doing a controlled dissection. Highlights of this are cutting open the stomachs to find all sorts of things the sharks have eaten.
After dinner, we headed back to the beach for one final time. We had multiple classes about pirate lore (why they wore eyepatches), an astronomy class, and a lesson about echolocation.
We will be up early for clean up and will be taking off around 8 am, with the goal being to be back on campus by 3 pm. We will text updates along the way.