Compass Rose Academy

Summer 2026 is off to amazing start!

🌞 Summer Camp Team Members Needed! 🌞

Summer camp starts in just a few days, and we’re looking to add a few amazing people to our team!

Over the last few summers, some of our best staff members have been high school and college students who wanted meaningful work, hands-on experience, and a summer they actually enjoyed.

This isn’t a job where you’ll spend your day staring at a screen.

You’ll be:

☀️ Playing games
☀️ Building forts
☀️ Helping with art projects
☀️ Getting sandy at the beach
☀️ Exploring outdoors
☀️ Making memories with some pretty incredible kids

This position may be a great fit if you’re interested in:

📚 Education
👩‍🏫 Teaching
🧩 Special Education
👶 Early Childhood
💼 Business Administration
❤️ Working with children

We’re looking for people who are:

✅ Reliable
✅ Positive
✅ Energetic
✅ Willing to learn
✅ Comfortable working outdoors in the Florida summer

Experience is wonderful, but a great attitude, strong work ethic, and willingness to jump in are even more important.

Flexible schedules available.

If you know a responsible high school student, college student, recent graduate, or young adult looking for a summer job, please send them our way!

📱 Text Christine at 850-855-8792
📧 [email protected]

Please share! We would love to find a few great additions to our summer team. 🌊

🥕 We planted carrot seeds on a cold rainy day in February, and we figured a warm rainy day in May was the perfect time to pull them up!

They may have been small, but they were absolutely delicious. Next year we’re going to try planting them around Halloween and letting them grow all the way until spring break.

The kids loved this little garden adventure and were so excited to harvest something they planted themselves! 🌱🧡

🎃➡️🌱➡️🎃

Last October we bought pumpkins for Halloween at CRA… and somehow they’ve turned into one of the coolest long-term learning projects we’ve ever had.

After Halloween, we used them again as Thanksgiving decorations. After our Thanksgiving party, the kiddos who stayed late were able to pull the pumpkins apart and feed pieces to the deer. We tossed the leftover pumpkin bits out into the garden and wooded area and honestly didn’t think much more about it.

Fast forward to February… tiny pumpkin seedlings started popping up everywhere. 🌱

The kids & staff carefully transplanted the little seedlings into pots and moved them into our greenhouse. The same greenhouse that helps keep our turtle pond warm during the colder months.

After spring break, we moved the pumpkins into the garden boxes, and now they have completely taken off.

Last week the Eric & Stephen built trellises that they can actually walk through so they can watch the pumpkins climb and grow overhead. The vines are growing INSANELY fast, some of them are stretching 6–12 inches a day right now.

What started as holiday decorations has turned into months of science, gardening, observation, problem solving, patience, and excitement. Watching kids experience the full life cycle of something they helped care for is such a special thing.

Sometimes the best classroom projects are the ones you never planned. 💚🌱🎃

If you know Compass Rose Academy, you know Miss Christine loves to travel. 🌎 One thing she has always said while exploring museums, historic places, and cities around the world is:
“How do I bring my students here someday?”

Today, that dream brought 15 students to the Pensacola Museum of Art.

At the beginning of our tour, one of the curators asked if it was anyone’s first time visiting an art museum.

Every single child raised their hand.

Our Manta Rays are currently working on artist research projects, and today they spent an hour and a half completely immersed in the art around them.

The main exhibit they explored featured work from a local Pensacola artist and teacher, along with pieces from other local artists he has mentored. They also viewed an exhibit featuring recent college graduates earning their degrees in art.

The students asked thoughtful questions, made connections to their own research, and represented Compass Rose beautifully all day long.

They received so many compliments from both the museum staff and the people at the garden where we walked for lunch. Their kindness, curiosity, patience, and respect made us incredibly proud. ❤️

🤖⚡ Huge congratulations to Lizzy (4th - alternate), Kate (5th), Raiden (6th), Mia (7th), and Anna (7th)! ⚡🤖

For the past six weeks, this team, proudly named the Barracudas, has spent their Thursdays at Nerd Lab in Niceville learning how to design, build, troubleshoot, and code a LEGO Spike Prime robot for the FIRST LEGO League Superpowered Challenge.

Their robot, lovingly named Sparkles the Croissant 🥐✨, became the center of weeks of teamwork, coding, rebuilding, testing, adjusting, and problem solving.

Today, after all of their hard work, the Barracudas placed 🥉 3rd Overall 🥉 at the robotics competition!

What makes this extra special is that this team spans 4th through 7th grade. They learned to collaborate, communicate, and work through challenges together just like a real engineering team.

We are so proud of the way they represented CRA with perseverance, creativity, teamwork, and sportsmanship throughout the entire program.

A huge thank you to .niceville for providing such an incredible hands on STEM experience for our students! And to Mia’s mom for driving them each week. I can’t wait for the kids to compete in this again next year💙⚙️

How special was today. 🐢

Our kids had the opportunity to watch five rehabilitated sea turtles return home to the Gulf, and it was one of those moments you just can’t recreate in a classroom.

They waited patiently, respected the space, and took it all in.
(And yes… there was a lot of sand involved while we waited. 😅)

These are the kinds of experiences that stick; real world, meaningful, and bigger than us.

We’re grateful we got to be a small part of something so important. 💚

A big thank you to the Gulfarium C.A.R.E. Center and Gulfarium Marine Adventure Park for the incredible work you do caring for these animals, and to Topsail Hill Preserve State Park for hosting such a special Earth Day release and protecting our local environment. We’re so thankful to have been there.

And a huge thank you to our local golf cart team, sorry, low speed vehicle team! 😅 . We love the delivery and pick-up service, and the kids felt so special heading out to see the turtles. Happy Earth Day, everyone!

Summer at CRA is filling FAST ☀️

✨ AND we have something that almost never happens… ✨
Magical spots available for our 3 & 4 year olds - We call them Sea Turtles🐢💛

If you’ve been waiting for an opening, this is it.

Older groups are filling quickly, but our littlest learners still have a few spots ready for the sweetest summer 🥹

✔️ Hands-on learning
✔️ Outdoor play
✔️ Small group ratios
✔️ A summer they’ll never forget

Ages 3–12 | Weekly enrollment options

📲 Grab your spot here: https://canva.link/1smswsnf1vm9shu

Let’s make this their best summer yet ✨

🌊✨ This. Right here. ✨🌊

These photos are the perfect example of one of the most special moments at Compass Rose,

When our littles and bigs work together. 🤍

Kinder and Second.
4th and Seventh.
PreK Sea Turtles and our Manta Rays (3rd–5th).

It’s the reading help.
The math explanations.
The patience.
The leadership.
The confidence building.
The “you’ve got this” whispers.

It’s the way the older students naturally step up…
And the way the younger ones look at them like superheroes.

This is what multi-age learning looks like.
This is community.
This is mentorship.
This is Compass Rose. 🧭

🌸 Botany in Action! 🔬 🌸

The Manta Ray class is continuing their botany unit, and the students are currently studying the parts of a flower.

Today they used the microscopes to take a closer look at one specific part of the flower — the stamen (the pollen-producing part). Students carefully prepared slides with a sample from a flower, added distilled water, placed a slide cover, and then observed it under the microscope.

It’s always exciting when we move from just learning about something… to actually seeing it up close! 🌼✨