Please join us in our classroom on Tuesday, June 19th at 2:00 PM to celebrate with us as we receive our



Division 2 has been learning about how to help others using First Aid and now we have completed our training! With our knowledge of First Aid, we can use a bandage to stop severe bleeding, give abdominal thrusts to someone who is choking, and split a broken arm. We also learned about how to recognize poisons around our home and how to help someone who has eaten or drank a poison. Most importantly, we learned about how to prevent injuries and call 9-1-1 if we need help.

We are excited to be 'graduating' from our First Aid program, and we hope you will join us this Tuesday.

Leave us a comment:


What was your favourite part about First Aid training?


What injury prevention tips can you remember from your training? 

NEW Voicemail!

Have you seen the new voicemail button floating on the right hand side of our blog? If you click on it, you can send us a voice message!

We had some time this week to play with our new voicemail, and everyone seemed to have the same thing on their mind ... Miss. OC! Check out what Division 2 had to say ...

Leave us a comment: 


What do you think about the new voicemail feature on our blog?


Give our new voicemail a try: all you have to do is click the grey "send voicemail" button, press the green "start recording" button, and then start talking!  

Multiplying Magicians!

Our class is learning about multiplying! Yesterday, we made a Math-Art project that was a bit of a game, too! We rolled two dice and used the numbers we rolled to help us build multiplication arrays on a large piece of graph paper. One number rolled became the number of rows, and the other number told us how many squares to colour in each row. Check us out in action!

Lots of interesting conversations were had about how to make arrays. 

Would we draw it in 5 rows of 6, or 6 rows of 5? 

And, hey! Did you notice that 3 rows of 4 covers the same number of squares as 2 rows of 6? Cool! 

Iven and Preston came up with another creative way to show what a roll of the dice meant! 

Here, they showed 3 x 2 = 6.

Crayons love Math, don't you know?

 And, at the request of one fabulous group of Mathematicians, here is one of our favourite new Math videos:

A Fresh New Beat for Multiplying Fives 

Leave us a comment: 


What is your favourite number to multiply by? 


Can you build an array in your comment with *'s ? 

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?

Field Trip Reflections

After our salmon release field trip, we spent some time reflecting and writing paragraphs about our experience. Here is a peek at what some of us had to say about our trip...

My Best Field Trip

       Yesterday I went on a field trip to release our salmon. The first thing we did was go down to the river to release our salmon. We grabbed a baggie and Kevin put water and fish in the bag and then we put it under water for 5 seconds. Then we slowly dipped the fish out. After that we went around to stations. My favourite station was the salmon life-cycle play. I also liked the station where we released our salmon. The best part about releasing our salmon was I got to name the salmon in my head. My most favourite part was walking to the bus - it was fun! I thought it was a good field trip. 

By: Brandon

Releasing our Salmon

       Yesterday I went on a field trip to release our salmon. The first thing we did was go down to release our salmon. We grabbed a baggie and Kevin put water and a fish in the bag then we put it under water for 5 seconds. Then we slowly dipped the fish out. After that we went to stations. My favourite station was the third play. It was funny because one of the boys made the female salmon lay eggs. The male salmon was funny, too, when one of the boys made the male fish spray out white stuff. I think it was supposed to be Milt. Then we felt some snakes. I think the snakes felt really smooth and colourful. I tried to feel the tongue but the tongue was too fast to feel it. I thought it was so much fun to do that I wanted to do it again and again. 

By: Riannon

Our Fun Field Trip

       Yesterday we went on a field trip to release our salmon. The first thing we did was go down to the river to release our salmon. We grabbed a baggie and Kevin put it in water and fish in the baggie and then we put the baggie under the water for 10 or 5 seconds. And then we slowly dipped the fish in the water and said Good-Bye. And after that we went around to stations. My favourite station was touching the fish and touching the snakes. After that we pretended we were fish and we pretended we traveled to the sea. And I felt happy. The field trip was fun. 

By: Fuzzy

Leave us a comment: 

What was your favourite part of the field trip to release our salmon? 

Did you name your salmon as you let it go, like Brandon did? What did you name your salmon? 

Releasing our Salmon Fry

If you've been following us through the year, you'll know that we have been raising salmon in our classroom tank. Back in December, we got about 50 eggs in our tank. Our eggs were eyed already, which means that there were already baby salmon growing inside them.

Can you see the "eyes"?

A few months after we got our eggs, they hatched! We got to watch the tiny Alvein break out of their eggs and wriggle around on the bottom of the tank. Alvein can't swim because they have a heavy yolk sac still attached to their belly. That yolk sac gives them the energy they need to grow!

Alvein like this one can't swim yet!

As our Alveins grew, their yolk sacs shrank and they finally buttoned-up. Then they took their first trip to the surface of the tank! At the surface, they took a gulp of air and filled up their swim bladders. We learned that a fish's swim bladder is like a life jacket that helps the fish float. Now our Alvein are called Fry!

At the end of May, it was time for our little Fry to leave home! We carefully packed our Fry into a bucket, and set off for the Lillooet Lower Spawning Channel.

Cup by cup, we moved our Fry's water into a bucket so we could bring them on the bus.

Can you see the big block of ice? Fry need to be kept in very cool water. 

Once we filled the bucket with water, it was time to catch all our fish!

 
Our salmon made it safely to Lillooet with a bunch of Fry from Mr. Remple's class up at the high school. Mr. Remple even managed to rescue a few escapees from the concrete, so every last fish was able to make the trip! When we arrived in Lillooet, it was time to say good-bye to the little Fry we had raised.

Kevin gave us each a plastic bag with a few of our Fry in it to release.

The stream is massive compared to the tank our Fry have grn up in!

After releasing our salmon into the Spawning Channel, we were luck to go on a hike around the channel and explore our Fry's new habitat. The Lillooet Lower Spawning Channel was made by people to help Pink salmon, and now Coho salmon, regain areas to spawn and grow up. We learned a lot about what makes the Spawning Channel a great home for our little Fry. 

Taking the bridge across the Channel.

A guide explains the important features of the Fry's new habitat.

The Spawning Channel is a great fish habitat! It is surrounded by trees and bushes and these are important for the salmon because they keep shade over the water and that makes it nice and cool. We also noticed lots of large rocks in the Channel. When the water rushes over the rocks, it makes little waves kind of like rapids in a bigger river. Those waves are important because they mix more oxygen into the water and the fish need that to breathe. Another important part of the salmon's habitat is at the bottom of the Channel - it's covered in gravel. Adult salmon dig their redds in the gravel, so without gravel there would be nowhere for the eggs to be buried!

We also discovered that the Spawning Channel is home to a lot of other creatures that are friends and predators of the salmon. We got to look up close at many different creatures along our hike.

Can you guess what animal lives here?

One thing our Fry will need to start looking for right away is food! What does a tiny fish eat? They eat tiny creatures! In the waters of the stream, we found many tiny insect larvae and other creatures that the salmon prey on. 

With a net you can catch creatures in the muddy stream waters.

We used magnifying glasses and these viewfinders to take a look the creatures we caught.

We looked at drawings of larvae to try and identify the creatures we found. 

Our Fry aren't the only fish feeding on these tiny creatures, though. There are many different varieties of fish living in the Channel and they all need different things to survive. We took a look at some fish - big and small - that share a habitat with our salmon Fry.

Can you spot the sucker fish?

We got to feel fish scales and learn about how they protect a fish.

Division 2 takes a look at a map of the local watershed. 

Our Fry are only just beginning their journeys. After they grow up into Smolts in the Spawning Channel, they will leave the stream and head to the river. Once they reach the river, they will travel across British Columbia, from Lillooet down to Vancouver. They'll be heading for the coast! Once the reach the ocean, they swim up the coastline of BC, past Vancouver Island, and all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. It's a trip that will take years and thousands of kilometers to make. In the ocean, our salmon will eat larger fish and grow into adults. When they are ready to spawn, they will find their way back to the stream where we released them in Lillooet, and they will lay their eggs there! What an adventure!

Division 2 made an adventure of our own, pretending we were Smolts heading down the river towards the ocean. We had to work hard to "survive" the trip - passing lots of friends, predators, and human-made roadblocks on our way! Can you remember all the different challenges we faced as Smolts?

We set off on an imaginary journey as Smolts!

Leave us a comment: 

What did you see on your journey to the ocean as a Smolt? Was it a friend or a predator? 

Share something new that you learned about Salmon on our trip! 

What do you think it would be like to be a tiny Fry in the giant Spawning Channel? 

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?