Month: January 2023

Thank you to all Div. 6 parents for providing everything necessary, from skate sizes to booster seats to filling out permission slips and, lastly providing spaces in your car.   Everything fell into place perfectly this morning and the event went off without a hitch.  The children were so excited and had a wonderful time.  I am grateful for the support in making sure that all children could access this program.

*I will try to get a photo with everyone in the class at the next session.

We were tired when we got back, but had a fabulous day of learning that included our final activity.  This afternoon we created a food web that included salmon as an anchor piece of interconnecting food chains in our local ecosystem.  Each student was given a different animal (land, air, and sea) and asked to place it and connect it to a web using arrows.  It was a fascinating way to plainly see the biodiversity of our coastal environment and furthered our discussion of how energy is needed for life.

In the next few days, we will be taking a closer look at the “oolichan” fish and its historic and continued importance to local Indigenous life.

Lastly, we have been starting to take a look at freshwater sources and availability as we start to lay the groundwork for our focus on the Fraser River later this year.

I gave the students 100 pennies or counters.  They were asked: if those 100 pennies represent all the water in the world, how many of those pennies would be salt water? freshwater? 

Some partnerships split their pennies 50/50; others 70/30; others 60/40.  No one was prepared for the real answer:

97% salt water and 3% freshwater.  A collective “What?!?” rang through the class when they heard the answer.  Furthermore, the 3% didn’t even represent readily available fresh water as much of it is frozen or hanging around underground.

This activity gave the students a sense of how precious our freshwater is and how important it is to conserve and protect this resource.

All of these connections will hopefully build toward giving our children the ability to express and reflect on personal or shared experiences of place (Science Curriculum).  The students continue to work on their indigenous innovations projects where we were able to connect that most of the indigenous innovations/inventions came from their experience with the land. I will publish photos of that exciting group project soon.

If you’re celebrating this weekend, enjoy the family time and the cultural traditions.  Best Wishes for a great start to a prosperous and healthy New Year.

Wishing our Div. 6 families a healthy and happy 2023.  Our first week back has gone well and we have made a great start in our learning.  I will try and keep you posted as we go along.

Our salmon eggs arrived Wednesday.  We received 55 chum eggs and have been busy learning all about an ideal salmon habitat and starting to learn about the life cycle.  Have a look below at the video as the ladies dropped them into our healthy salmon habitat.