Excited Phoenix School 6th – 8th graders and teachers heading to Los Angeles, for a week of marine studies at Catalina Island Marine Institute begin their day early at Boston’s Logan Airport. As weary as we are when we reach San Pedro, we find a second wind as we...

Morning comes too soon for some of us after being rocked to sleep aboard the Exy Johnson last night, but we must catch our Catalina Island ferry where we hope to see our first sea creatures….and we do. Dolphins swim alongside and grey whales spout in the distance as...

None of us can believe today is our last at CIMI. The week has flown, packed with marine science, challenge, adventure, and fun. TJ is the BEST Marine Science instructor across the 7 seas! All Phoenix kids enthusiastically concur. However, the week is not quite over....

Thanks to Mistal and Mike, and TJ’s magic, Phoenix kids are the only school group, ever, to get to go to the island’s back side. Into the SUVs we scramble, and up, up, around the winding switchbacks and over the top of the ridge we go. As we descend to the other side...

Tonight we swim with the plankton that, hopefully, will sparkle and glow for us. First, however, we must see who are to be our swim partners this evening (our planktonic ones, that is). In the Plankton Lab we observe phytoplankton and zooplankton under microscopes....

Silly Californians, they think it’s chilly. We love the 85 degree days and 65 degree nights. It’s a perfect morning for snorkeling. We are so excited! It’s our orientation snorkel. I wonder why we have to have an orientation because we have been practicing with Mike...

This is the time of year when my students begin pestering me for “real” word problems. They love solving problems that include names of their classmates which provides a collaborative experience where they can bounce ideas off each other as they work through some...