joceyrivera-blog

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My turtling partner an I had a busy night patrolling the beach watching out for turtles and collecting data.

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This is the look on our faces after completing one session of our dive training/certification. We love being under the water and breathing! We weren’t able to take any pictures of our struggles learning the new skills with our instructor. Those pictures might have been hilarious! Tackling learning new skills is never easy at any age. Learning something new makes us uncomfortable because of the unknown, failure, and awkward success. This experience - learning to SCUBA dive is really opening our eyes to what our learners go through. We both felt for our students who struggle learning new things. We had a patient instructor who didn’t give up on us and had us repeat some skills that posed a challenge to us. I think we both never thought how challenging it would be once we were in the water. Our instructor kept repeating why these skills were essentially important and that we would keep trying until he felt satisfied that we showed competence. Gentle nudges, applauds under the water, lots of “OK” signals were the instructor’s way to help us -the struggling students- keep trying. The smiles on our faces show the joy of accomplishment. Our efforts paid off. We are not done yet but we are really excited for day 2! #FFTeachers #FFTFellows

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My inspiration for wanting to help sea turtles was finding this leatherback hatchling on a beach walk in 2014. 

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The journey is about to begin.

On Wednesday, August 10th Laura Newman (second grade special education teacher at the Henderson K-12 Lower School) and I (Jocelyn Rivera, first grade general education teacher at the Henderson K-12 Lower School) will board a flight to St. Croix, USVI to begin our Fund for Teachers Fellowship. We have been preparing for this Fellowship/adventure to the Caribbean by taking a SCUBA Open Water course and writing lesson plans for teaching our students about sea turtles and the coral reef. Laura spent a week in July at the New England Aquarium learning how to teach young children about Ocean Science, a course I also took in 20014. We will be completing our SCUBA lessons so we can observe sea turtles and their ocean habitat, the coral reef first hand. Along with our underwater adventures, we plan to volunteer with The Nature Conservancy with their Sea Turtle Monitoring Program. As citizen scientists we will be working alongside marine biologist, Kemit-Amon Lewis monitoring the East End beaches for sea turtles nesting. With first hand experience doing the work of scientist helping a beloved species, the sea turtle, we will have lots to share with our students who are also ocean lovers, animal lovers and - KHOA’s - Kids Helping Ocean Animals. Stay tuned for more on our adventures!

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Here’s one KHOA cleaning up the beach!