Shake, Rattle, and Roll

We have finished our rattles! Earlier last week, we sewed together two pieces of rawhide with sinew and stuffed our pouches with sand to form our rattles. Once our rattles were dry we painted them and filled them with beans, rocks, and rice to give them a unique 'rattle' sound.

Take a look at our Division 2 artists at work!

Painting stripes takes focus

Bear paws on Cole's rattle.

  

When the paint was dry, we filled our rattles with different objects to give them their 'rattle'!

Can you hear the differences between these rattles? 

The awesome dudes of Division 2 with their rattles.

The magnificent ladies of Division 2 with their rattles.

Click on a photo to make it larger. :) 

Some of our rattles were created especially for Dads!

Leave us a comment:


Who did you give your rattle to? 


What did you think about making rattles? Was it difficult? Easy? 


How did you decide what objects to put into your rattle to give it its sound? 

Making Rattles

The talented students in Division 2 are making rattles. Our rattles are made out of hide and sinew. We had to soak the hide overnight to make it soft and flexible. Then, using a needle, we sewed the hide together with a long strand of sinew.

Once we had sewn the pieces of hide together firmly, we filled the hide with sand. The sand makes the hide bulge in the middle. When the hide dries, we will empty out the sand and our rattles will be hollow.

We hung our rattles up by the sinew so the stitches will tighten as they dry. Tomorrow, we will empty out the sand and choose objects to put in our rattle to make the sound!

Leave us a comment: 

What was the experience of making a rattle like? Was it difficult, or easy? 

What objects do you think we could put inside the rattle to make a noise? 

Have you ever made anything out of hide and sinew before? What did you make?

Gone Picking!

Springtime is a great time of year to be outside: the sun is shining, leaves are returning to the trees, plants are growing and flowers are blooming, and all kinds of creatures are out and about. In the month of May, some very special plants are growing in our valley. A few weeks ago, Brenda and Irene took our Division 2 class out to the Botany Valley to pick sTweta and Tatoon: wild spinach and wild potatoes. What an adventure we had! 

 As we soon discovered, picking Tatoon is harder than it looks. We came with spoons and sticks and even some crow-bars to dig up our Tatoon. The first thing you need to do when picking Tatoon is look for patches of white flowers. We were lucky, because the field we found was just covered in blooms! It was like an ocean of tiny petals.

Check out this video of a Division 2 student digging for Tatoon. She is using a spoon to try and wedge the roots of the Tatoon plant up and out of the soil. 

Here's the potato she ended up uncovering from the Tatoon plant she dug up! 

Even though the digging was tough, we had a lot of success. The Tatoon we found varied in size from potatoes as tiny as peas to ones as giant as baseballs. When we cooked these up later, back at school, we discovered that they tasted a lot like the potatoes you can buy at the grocery store. We boiled them and then fried them in margarine to make them crispy on the outside! Mmmmm!

A crowbar makes a great digging tool.

Teamwork makes the job easier!

 

We also found an excellent spot for picking sTweta. sTweta is easy to spot because it has bright yellow flowers and very distinctive leaves. The leaves are long and rounded - they look a little bit like fingers! sTweta also has a really delicate sweet smell, so it's easy to tell if you're picking the right plant! It tastes great freshly picked, especially the white root tips, but it also tastes yummy when it's steamed with a little melted butter on top. We tried it both ways, and it was delicious! 

The sTweta grows on hillsides.

This student picked a whole bag full!

We were very fortunate to have an elder join us on our picking trip. Ellen showed us how to dig up Tatoon and how to spot sTweta. She shared some stories with us about picking when she was growing up. Thank-you, Ellen, for teaching us about picking! 

Ellen holds up a sTweta plant. You can see its white roots and long green leaves.

Thanks also to Irene and Brenda, who organized our trip! 

Leave us a comment:

How many Tatoon did you dig up?

What is your favourite traditional food?

What other things do you like to pick in the springtime? 

Salmon inside-out

Back in April, Division 2 had a special visitor! Kevin came to our classroom to teach us about how a salmon survives in the river. He brought an adult salmon with him, and then he dissected it so we could see all the different body parts that help a salmon stay alive. 

This is an adult male salmon. Can you see its hook nose?

First Kevin showed us how to tell if an adult salmon is a male or female. This adult salmon is a male. You can tell because its sides are dark red and it has a hooked nose. Male and female salmon are different on the inside, too. A male salmon has two milt sacs and a female salmon will have hundreds of eggs! We saw male and female salmon just like this one, that were ready to spawn, when we visited Adam's River salmon run this September. 

The outside of a salmon's body helps it survive in the water. It has sticky slime all over its body to help it swim fast and slip away from predators. Do you know what animals prey on salmon? Salmon's body's are also covered in scales. Kevin showed us that a fish's scales are like a tree trunk - they have growth rings! You can look at the number of rings on a salmon's scales to tell how old a salmon is. We got to look at the salmon's scales through magnifying glasses. What other tool could you use to see a fish scale up close? 

  

Kevin removes the milt sacs from the salmon. 

Kevin showed us all the different organs you can find inside an adult salmon's body. !He told us how each one has its own job to do in order to keep the salmon alive. We got to take a close look at each organ. It got a little bloody ... but we didn't mind!

At the end of the dissection, we got a special demonstration from Kevin. He showed us how to fillet the salmon and slice it into pieces for drying. In Lytton, many people air dry the salmon with a little bit of salt to make stwen. We talked about all the different ways to cure a salmon, and discovered that some of our families can salmon, air dry salmon, and smoke salmon. Mmm! Have you ever filleted a salmon before? 

Kevin shows us how to slice the fillet to make stwen.

Can you guess what these different organs are? Leave your answers as a comment below! 

Organ #1 

Clue: This organ digests the food that the salmon eats. 

Organ #2 
Clue: Without this organ, a salmon would sink.

Organ #3 
Clue: This organ helps a fish collect something very valuable from the water - oxygen!

Organ #4
Clue: This organ is actually a pump made of strong muscle.
Like a house with different rooms, ours has four rooms, but a salmon's only has 2!

Organ #5
Clue: This organ has a twin, but they can both move on their own
to help a salmon see above and below itself at the same time!