We had our second session with the SFU Fair Trade team on Thursday, March 11th! We explored how fair trade is connected to climate resilience. We considered forest friendly farming, water conservation and biodiversity as important aspects of resilience! We wondered about how our own habitat restoration project connects!

Some of our other wonders are:

• what causes climate change? When did it start?
• what can we do to stop climate change?
• how and when did fair trade start?
• how do farmers join fair trade?
• are there instructions to practice forest friendly farming?
• when it is cold or winter time, does cocoa and other food still grow?

We hope you enjoyed our fair trade banana and chocolate surprises!

By exploring our forest space and other forest spaces, we started examining what a happy and healthy forest looks like!

Last week we started exploring light mapping! What light does our space get? How does that influence who lives here?

This week, we learned about the skills of surveying! How can we map our places even more closely? How can we identify who lives here and beginning planning where we want to plant our new native species?

Thank you, Pablo, for helping us understanding these math connections to our forest inquiry!

Gardening has been such an important part of our year! We carefully observed our potatoes before planting them in the pod! What do our potatoes need to grow? How many potatoes do you estimate will grow from our seed potatoes? Why did we plant them inside?

Div. 6 has been so excited to honour their learning and time by creating books in a bag. They chose several special symbols to represent the book using found and created items. Share your book in a bag with your family this spring break! Why did you choose each special item?

Div. 6 has been looking closely at specimens from the Beaty Biodiversity Museum Forest Box! We recognized so many of these amazing species, and learned about many new ones! Who knew there were so many different kinds of mosses? We were amazed at the connections we could find between them all. After observing, wondering, learning, and playing, we took our curiosity outside. We wanted to see what plants, animals, and fungi we could find out in the forest of Burnaby Mountain beyond our familiar trails.

With our field guides and and our new field nature journals, we tried to see who we could find living here! It was a long and exhausting hike, but it was worth it to find these new treasures! We wondered, why do these forest spaces look different than the ones near our school?

A forest is not just a group of trees! It is so much more! We have been exploring the stories of our forest this year. Recently, we have taken photos and started creating power point projects to express our understanding.

As we get to know our forest, we are realizing our role in protecting these places. Last week, we created vegetation maps of the forest spaces near our garden, and are excited for light mapping next week! Our findings will help us in our next steps of our forest understory restoration project!

Div. 6 has been exploring with cyanotype paper. How can we understand the interplay between light, shadows, and form? We learned the story of Anna Atkins and the first photograph in Bluest of Blues. Then we set out to represent our forest treasures in yet another way. We are excited to create some new experiments by changing some of the variables to see how it changes the outcomes!

Last week, we connected with the SFU Fairtrade team to participate in a fabulous workshop. We explored what people need to be happy and healthy. We examined what the supply line looks like and how farmers fit in to our systems. How does ethical decision-making connect to our daily lives? How does it connect to our systems? We wondered if and how our actions could encourage fair treatment for people around the world, because everyone deserves to get their basic needs met.

Div. 6 found and created hearts around our school yard. Can you find any on your adventures this weekend?

We are so grateful for our lovely class and school community.

How do we help each other feel cared for, celebrated, appreciated, seen, and respected? How do listen to the stories of others to help us build our understanding of the world and what we want the world to be?

We created this video in December, but we wanted to share it now, because we think it is a perfect fit for this month of February. In Wishtree, someone carved “Leave” into Red and we considered how that message made the community feel. How do we want our community to feel? We considered the messages we wanted to share with our school, even from a distance. Students in Div. 6 and 8 created affirmations from the heart and after sharing them through our video, we posted our hearts all around the school for all to see!

Februrary is…

• Black history month
• Lunar new year, Feb. 12th
• Valentine’s day, spreading kindness on Feb. 12/14th
• Family day, Feb. 15th
• Pink shirt day, Feb. 24th