At the recent National Marine Educators Meeting in Boston, Lisa Chizek, a 5th and 6th grade teacher from Iowa joined other teachers to learn about the new curriculum, Fresh and Salt, which connects Great Lakes and ocean sciences. IISG’s Terri Hallesy, education specialist, led this session. Here are some comments from Lisa:

“I am so excited to have these wonderful and effective resources to help connect my students with the Great Lakes and Ocean Literacy Principles. I believe we are so interconnected with the Great Lakes and the ocean that it is very necessary for everyone to become literate about how these wonderful bodies of water affect our planet in so many ways and how we affect them. It is very important to me, as a person who wants my students to be able to understand and think critically about our world, to help my students become literate with these principles.

“Learning about our planet’s great bodies of water is a responsibility of every member of society. Living in land-locked Iowa does not diminish this responsibility or make it irrelevant. We are all interconnected with these bodies of water. I plan to incorporate these wonderful lessons in both my 5th and 6th grade classes.”