Even before school started this year, Horace Mann Lower Division First Graders were excited about the ocean. Each student had received a letter from his or her teacher to welcome them to First Grade, and to introduce the ocean curriculum. The children started their exploration in September, including different classroom lessons, activities where they brought ocean-themed objects to school to share, and plenty of ocean themed stories and projects. Some classes even did an activity with different snacks representing the different layers of the ocean: Nilla wafers, Graham Crackers, and Oreos representing the twilight zone, dark zone, and the abyss- with blue Jello for the sunlight zone, of course. The ocean got even bigger on October 4th, when the SoundWaters team of instructors visited the Lower Division to conduct workshops focused on the ocean curriculum, and to prepare the children for what they would see when they visited. On October 10th and October 23rd, the First Grade classes traveled to Stamford, Connecticut to visit SoundWaters where they observed organisms found in the Long Island Sound and explored the beach and the sand marsh.