Our Salmon Eggs Hatched!
/Our salmon eggs began hatching the Monday before Thanksgiving break. By the time we returned from Thanksgiving break, all of the eggs had hatched! Mark set up an iPad to take time lapse photos throughout the break and we were excited to watch the time lapse video upon our return. The salmon are now in the alevin stage of development. At the alevin stage they have yolk sacs attached to their bodies, which provide all the nutrients they need. It was amazing to watch them wiggle their tails to emerge from the egg. After hatching, the fish were quite exhausted and needed to rest. This week we've been observing them swimming around the tank with their bright orange egg sacs still attached. We've been reading books about salmon and learning how to take research notes. We discussed how note taking is different from writing full sentences. After taking notes and compiling research, students have been writing pages for their salmon books. So far they've written about the egg stage, alevin stage, and fry stage. We have also been working on creating a salmon mural in our classroom. We've added the blue river water, dozens of pebbles at the bottom of the river, and salmon eggs in the gravel. In addition, we've been reading books written by indigneous authors. During our whole group numeracy block we've been working on salmon calculations, taking inventory of canned foods, learning about tessellations with Ms. Ren, and increasing our number fluency through playing Yahtzee. We did our first can food delivery before Thanksgiving break. We will be doing another delivery on December 17th. In our outdoor explorations this week we learned about the Thuja plicata, otherwise known as the western red cedar, that is growing in our outdoor classroom. We were surprised to learn that the western red cedar is not a true cedar in the genus Cedrus. The western red cedar is an arborvitae. Arborvitae means "tree of life". Mark visited our outdoor classroom to teach us about this amazing species and model how we can climb the tree in a way that is safe for us and for this living organism. We had an interesting discussion about how trees can communicate with one another. Many students enjoyed tree climbing during their outdoor explorations this week.
