FAIRHOPE, Ala. — “I’ve got the whole ocean in my shoes,” Ernest Holloway said, shaking sand from his sneakers.

Holloway, 10, a student at Daphne Middle School, laughed as the water and sand poured out, then slipped his shoes back on and joined other students exploring the waterfront at Pelican Point where Weeks Bay flows into Mobile Bay.

The 10 students were from several schools in the county and members of the Ruff Wilson Daphne Boys & Girls Club in Baldwin County, an affiliate of the Boys & Girls Clubs of South Alabama.

They were together for a couple days this week to learn about local marine life and turn it into art, maybe picking up a few other lessons along the way.

“I first contacted Nancy (Raia) sometime about March to inquire if she was interested in collaborating on a combined science and art summer camp,” said Eric Brunden, stewardship coordinator of the Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve south of Fairhope. “After some discussion we both felt it would be a good idea, that offering students the opportunity to gain knowledge and experience habitats firsthand would spark creativity and enthusiasm.”

The students were part of the “Arts Without Limits” program, a collaboration between Weeks Bay Reserve and the Eastern Shore Art Center, where Nancy Raia directs a program connecting artists and students of all ages with educational opportunities in the community.

“These are children having the experience of being in an environment that functions as a marine nursery and learning how important that is,” Raia said. “Having them outside the class is important beyond limits. It’s one thing to study a book, but it’s another to pick up a crab and then put it back where you found it.”

The students used large seines and smaller hand nets to collect marine life and study it with the help of staff from Weeks Bay Reserve.

“Let’s see what you got,” said Angela Underwood, educational assistant at the reserve, as the students leaned over to see what they had pulled in with the large net.

In less than an hour they had collected and identified baby shrimp, crabs, jellyfish, and numerous small fish species.

One local fisherman walked up with a small, live shark in a bucket he had caught, to ask the adults if he could show it to the students.

“I don’t want to scare them,” he said.

He needn’t have worried. The students crowded in close.

“Can we touch him,” one asked.

“He feels weird,” one student said.

“Look at his gills,” another said.

One of the teachers said he probably needed to get the shark back in the water, and the fisherman walked to the other side of the point to return the black-tipped shark to the bay.

“I think they will take away from this experience an appreciation for the environment and how everything connects,” said L.G. Adams, manager at Weeks Bay Reserve. “It’s a lot of fun, but they’re learning something. They then go back to the classroom and reflect on the experience through the art they do and start thinking about all the relationships in nature. It’s going to stick with them for a while.”

After the students recorded their observations in their small yellow “waterproof field notebooks,” they headed back to the Weeks Bay Reserve for the intensive artistic experience part of the program.

“It sounds like someone laughing,” said Destiney Lawrence, an eighth-grade student at Fairhope Middle School, referring to the sounds of various birds that were singing, calling and screeching from a CD player at the Weeks Bay Reserve auditorium, where the students gathered after their trip to Pelican Point.

“Well then, draw that,” said Raia, as she walked around the room, helping the students translate the sounds they were hearing into visual images. They had also drawn, painted and composed montages of creations of crabs, birds and other creatures they had seen during their two days in the marshes and beaches of the watershed.

“I heard yesterday that the woodpecker’s tail holds it up on the tree and not its feet,” Lawrence said. “I never knew that.”

The students were intently working on a number of artistic creations Thursday. Some of the works may be displayed in the future at the Eastern Shore Art Center, Raia said.

After their days in the field and classroom, they returned to the Boys & Girls Club chapter office in Daphne. That office currently serves 103 members from throughout the county, said Barbara Brown, who has served as the club’s unit director for 14 years.

“The children came back and were very excited,” Brown said. “They got a chance to experience things that many of them never had before, to see and feel marine life up close. They had a ball.”

Brown said the students came back and shared their experiences with the other students in Daphne who want to go next year. She said she hopes they can maintain a relationship with the Arts Without Limits program, and that it continues next year.

But it was more than just fun and games for the students this week.

“There’s maybe only one student in this group who will become a biologist or scientist,” Adams said. “But they’re all going to become voters and members of the community, and they’ll be better members of society because of this. The power of knowledgeable voters is so important.”

Raia said among the students in this week’s program, several want to be an artist, pediatrician, veterinarian, kindergarten teacher and a mathematician. And one student, Raia remarked, did say she wanted to be a scientist.

Jenae Brown, 12, an eighth-grade student at Hillsdale Middle School, was that student, and one of the ones who looked the closest when they pulled the nets in and asked the most questions about what they found.

“I learned that different creatures stay in the marsh,” she said. “We need to make sure it’s a safe environment for them.”