Helping out scientists and composing music at the same time? Yes, please! In order to get ready for the Antarctic learning journey the students get to be a part of this year, we participated in the Float Your Boat program. This program allows schools to decorate wooden boats that are stamped with the organization’s website and a tracking number. The boats are deployed on an Arctic ice floe, along with a gps buoy. We are able to track the buoys to see where our boats are. Eventually, the ice floe drifts to warmer water and melts. The boats then end up dispersed in the ocean currents, where they will wash up on shore and citizen scientists turn them in.
Even though my travels will take me to the opposite side of our Earth from these boats, it is a great program for students to learn about ocean currents and ice melt. Additionally, we were able to decorate the boats with music – students composed songs in the key of C (get it….SEA???). I checked to make sure they had the right number of beats in a measure, and used notes that fit that key as a formative assessment from music theory, and they get to spread music throughout the world! They got to decorate the top in whatever manner they wanted!
After our entire school decorated the boats (grades 3-year old kindergarten all the way up to 8th grade), they got mailed off to Washington. They will embark on their journey from there!
Car Full of Harmony 
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