Volunteering at Free Food Market
/During this season of giving the Otters and Whales teamed up to help distribute food to community members in need. Pacific’s Center for a Sustainable Society has a free food market each month. This month Otters and Whales were greeters during the food market on campus. We said hello to the people shopping for free food and gave each shopper a handmade ornament and card designed by our students. One of the food shoppers exclaimed, “this ornament makes me so happy that I want to cry!”. College students who were helping distribute food met with small groups of ELC students to answer questions and describe how the food bank works. It felt so good to spread love in our community. We have been talking about what it must feel like to not have enough food to eat. We discussed how hard it would be to work or go to school if you hadn’t eaten any food for dinner or breakfast. It was beneficial for students to see how the canned food they helped collect in October goes to help real people who are hungry. We also talked about how extremely lucky we are to have access to healthy foods on a daily basis. Back at our outdoor classroom we’ve been sure to fill up our bird feeders to keep our local birds fed this winter too.
This week we have been learning more about the alevin stage of salmon development. We read several books and used websites to find new facts about alevin. Students used the artistic medium of their choice to depict the alevin stage. Then they wrote down a fact that they found particularly interesting.
We celebrated Jayne’s birthday on Monday! We are so happy to have her as an honorary Otter student this year. Although she’s not officially an Otter, she joins us for many field expeditions, projects, and learning activities. In math this week we are working on being able to quickly add 1, 10, or 100 to numbers without using our fingers. We continue to practice math facts through salmon temperature unit calculations, measurements in cooking, and through a wide variety of math games. In writer’s workshop we are finishing up our imaginative story unit and are in various stages of publishing our stories.
