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N. Mianus students get taste of life on the Sound

By Andrew Shaw
Staff Writer


Published May 26 2007

The third installment of "Pirates of the Caribbean" is opening this week, but it didn't take popcorn and a movie screen to get North Mianus School fifth-graders singing a song of the sea yesterday aboard the SoundWaters schooner.

(Bob Luckey Jr./Staff photo)

The students were one of several classes from Greenwich this week taking ecological learning excursions with the Stamford-based SoundWaters. On the open sea, or at leasta trip around Grass Island on Long Island Sound, sailors must make their own entertainment.
("Did Jack Sparrow have an iPod? I don't think so," said Marissa Matsler, a SoundWaters educator, of the lead character in the swashbuckling Disney movie. "Let's sing like we're real old-time sailors."

She then led the group of about 30 students in a brash, throat-scratching sea chantey about "Haul Away Joe." Matsler was one of six educators joining Captain Shane Walden.

Most of the activities focused on environmental issues, though, with interactive learning stations on the 80-foot schooner including a model ecosystem inside a tank, a demonstration of the effects of groundwater pollution, a lecture on boating terminology and the crowd favorite, the tank full of live sea creatures such as flounder and crabs.

Cristina Frias, 11, said she liked touching the animals, many of which were caught using the schooner's trawl net that the students helped pull in from the sea. Cristina said she felt like a sailor helping her classmates hoist the sails.

SoundWaters has given Greenwich a week's worth of educational tours and free public sails in thanks for its contributions to the protection of the Sound and for its dedication to preserving the environment.

SoundWaters was founded in 1989 as an environmental, educational organization and has headquarters at Cove Island Park.

The three-hour trip aboard the "floating classroom" provides students with real-life sailing experience combined with lessons on the environment. Michael Pickering, a North Mianus School fifth-grade teacher who was aboard for the trip, said it's a good opportunity to show students what they've been discussing in textbooks.

"They actually see it," Pickering said. "So you can remember it."

In one of the stations, Matsler told the students how plankton provides as much as 80 percent of the earth's oxygen, despite being microscopic in size. She then explained how the tiniest phytoplankton is eaten by the larger zooplankton, up through the food chain.

"It's the circle of life," Matsler said.

"Or the circle of death," student Julia Zivic quickly replied.

"OK, or the circle of death, depending if you look at the glass half full or half empty, I guess," Matsler responded.

Zivic later said that touching the windowpane flounder, which has both of its eyes on one side of its thin body, was her favorite moment.

"He was all polka-dotted," said Julia, 11. Like many students, Julia said school might be much improved if it floated.

"I want my classroom to be out here now," she said.

Copyright © 2007, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.

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