The beginning of the academic year is always exciting for me because it signals my return to two of my favorite activities: learning and teaching! I’m offering three courses through Athena’s Advanced Academy in the beginning half of the semester: Marine Mammals, The Rocky Intertidal Ecosystem, and In-Depth Marine Biology.

I love teaching all of my courses, but I am particularly excited to teach In-Depth Marine Biology. For one, it’s a year-long course–the first I’ve ever taught! We’re going to cover some of my favorite topics under the umbrella of marine biology. Plus, my students are wonderful and are already diving deep into the material!

I wanted to share a couple of my students’ work from the first week of In-Depth Marine Biology with you from a taxonomic classification assignment. Students were tasked with pretending that everyday objects were organisms and creating their own taxonomic system to classify these “organisms.”

I am pleased to report that students took this idea and ran with it! We had writing instrument classification…

Two different candy classifications…

LEGO brick classification…

And even pasta!

And guess what?! There were more submissions too! The other submissions just had text, so they wouldn’t fit well in this format. But rest assured that they were all wonderful and creative too. As a class, we developed taxonomic classifications for board games, tea, and more!

I am so looking forward to seeing what my students create over the next academic year!