Remembrance Day gives us plenty to think about every year. We’ve been discussing the centennial of the end of the first World War. We have started to learn some about some individual Canadians who served during that terrible conflict. Some were already familiar to us, like Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. We also learned for the first time about some indigenous veterans of Canada’s armed forces, including sharpshooter,  Corporal Francis Pegahmagabow.

Thinking about those people, their stories and all the horrors of war make for some pretty serious conversations & thoughts to ponder. It was good to be able to create something that could be part of our act of remembrance. Origami poppies provided a new challenge for our minds & hand while also keeping us connected to the stories and events we have been learning about, balancing our need to remember and learn from the past with our need to look ahead & keep creating the world we want to live in.

We’re recycling more than ever! We are trying to reduce our waste & bring litterless lunches. We still return drink boxes & bottles for refunds. We recycle paper, and we compost our food scraps. There are more mixed containers we can recycle now (even takeout coffee cups!). And with the Recycle BC’s new pilot program for soft plastics and a wonderful volunteer to deliver those items as well as our Styrofoam, we have almost nothing left to send to the landfill.

Our new containers for our hallway stations are making things easier, but we are still learning what to put where. Do you know what to do with your waste at school? Test yourself with this little sorting game. (If you see a warning about Flash, click the link & click “Allow” so the game will run. On the Scratch Website, you can play the full screen version, look inside at the code or even try your own remix.)