It's been another short but full week, with the highlight being our visit to the Tynehead Fish Hatchery on Wednesday morning. (Sorry, I made a joke about having poop on my head to try to get them all to look at me for the photo below - this is why I teach young children...I have the same sense of humour. This strategy works great with my own kids, but apparently my expert strategy was a bust in a large group. Like good students, they started copying me by putting their hands on their heads. #Idon'tnormallyteachyourchildrenpottywords #Ipromise #Butallwordsarepartofliteracyright??). We have been working hard at school on learning about the salmon life cycle and the volunteers at the Hatchery did an amazing job of reinforcing those concepts for us! (Special thanks to one of our parent volunteers for some of these photos!) With hushed voices (well, sort of...), we got to visit a room where baby salmon eggs were incubating. We were shown visuals, or got to see first-hand, every step of the process from birth to death. One of our favourite parts was holding some salmon that had been frozen at full size. As a bonus, we even got to take turns feeding some trout! Back at school, we learned that salmon are really important to First Nations communities. Madame gave us some background information about who the First Nations people are (les "autochtones"). We were all very fascinated to learn that our school is on land that used to belong to other people and that our ancestors actually took the land from the First Nations communities. It was a revelation that sometimes, we are not always the good guys. We had lots of questions about this sensitive topic but we were very happy to learn that our country is trying to take good care of the First Nations people now and that they even have a special place to live called a "Reserve" right here in Pitt Meadows! We learn about them and talk about them a lot as a way of respecting them and remembering what they had to give up for us. (As an aside, anyone is welcome to drive onto the Katzie First Nations Reserve in Pitt Meadows. They even have a gift shop!) Madame spoke with an elder from the Katzie Reserve who told her that salmon are their reserve's main food source. We learned about how the Katzie people catch the salmon with big nets and then we began working on some Indigenous salmon art. Madame gave us lots of colours to choose from for our backgrounds, but we learned that it was best to choose just three colours because in art and in photography, the number 3 is considered to be the most beautiful number. Sweet little Lauren was so inspired by the stories about the First Nations people that she decided to draw a picture of how they might have been sad when their land was taken from them. :-( On a lighter note, our snack time today became "stupid human tricks" time. (...without using the word 'stupid'). ;-) If we come home saying that all we learned today was how to make monkey faces and hold pencils in our lips, Madame wants to assure parents that there was a lot more educational value to the rest of the day. ;-)
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