Environmental Education Initiatives in SD5

1. Environmental Education Initiatives in SD5

2. New Re-Cycling Center at Jaffray. A recycling team of 14 students take care of the sorting and collecting each week 

3. FJMS Kindergarten collected information and photos for our next Knook Book. We are looking at berries in the forest.  But we noticed so much more! The larches yellow needles carpet the forest floor. We listened to  Our boardwalk pond has leaves that float, and soggy sinking leaves. We finished up at Mrs. Sauerborn's garden to do some winter planting and rake up big piles of leaves.  

4. At GT we have continued with our garden.  We have harvested kale, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, beets and potatoes.  My class is having an outing each week somewhere in the neighbourhood and are working in the garden each week.  We just spread all of the compost that has turned into soil into our garden. 

5. Cathy Davies talked to me about how great the field trips were that our Gr 7 & Gr 10’s did with Outdoor Connections. They were at Kikomon all day and did team building activities from canoeing to fire building.

6. Save Our Bears - One class met with Kathy Murray of WildSafe BC. She talked about her challenges of educating our residents about keeping bears safe. My class decided to help her by creating products to help educate the public to remove bear attractants.  After doing their own neighbourhood surveys the class split into 4 different groups with 3 doing ‘Save our Bears’ videos and one group deciding to create a presentation that would be for Gr. 4s that currently do not get Bear Aware education.  One of our high school graduates came in to give a talk about how he edits his films as he now does big ski and tourism videos – the kids were stoked to have Dylan Siggers come!   In the midst of our project – a bear got into the garbage from our school dumpster so after talking to our custodian staff and principal they have decided to write a letter to ask for a Bear Bar to be added to our dumpster to make it more bear safe.  Finally – they also noticed that the ‘art painted’ dumpsters around town seem to be cleaner so have asked an artist to come in to talk to them about how we could paint our dumpster – and perhaps even with “Bear Safe” art.  This project keeps getting bigger but we are nearing completion….

7. Planning 10 students gathered all of the supplies they had collected from around the community and met Sophie Larsen, who runs the Cranbrook Food Action Garden. We worked with her and her summer student, Seamus, to build twenty five 5 gallon bucket gardens. These gardens have been given out to members in the community free of charge. The bucket garden design was inspired by University of Maryland project. The students liked the fact that it finds another life for used 5 gallon buckets, and also does a little to pitch in to community food security. The students planted the seeds for the bucket gardens in April and they grew in the Kimberley Community Greenhouse. Over the past two Springs, Planning 10 classes have learned about food security, soil health and the financial and health benefits of growing their own food by working in the Community Garden weekly.  Here’s a link to see the design: https://extension.umd.edu/growit/food-gardening-101/self-watering-containers-converting-5-gallon-bucket-mini-garden

8. Kootenay Orchards students in Grades 2, 3 and 4 went Creek Crawling with Patti and Dave from Mainstream Environmental Society’s Water Education Program. Students waded into Joseph Creek and collected samples of macro-invertebrates from this local habitat. They then classified the critters and learned what those creatures can teach us about stream health.

9. This fall my grade 12 students have hiked overnight you the Conrad Kain hut in bugaboo provincial park, backpacked close to 40km in 3 days in the Hughes range (maus, dibble, sunken drainages), and canoed three days on Columbia lake. On these trips students learned by experience, from each other and alongside mentors from the community. We also partnered with BC parks and did ecological restoration at ram creek. Students are now engaged in climbing, teaching survival and outdoor skills to grade 5s at KO and getting ready to stay thinking about their winter xc ski trip into Lake O'Hara. What a phenomenal classroom.

10. MBSS CormierMy linear after school class has also been enjoying learning in the outdoors. Thus group learned about trilobites and spent time hunting for fossils at a sure near cranbrook. They have also done archery, hiking, and have spent two sessions learning how to measure the health of our local creek.

11. Explorers Outside!Mme Jen and Ms. Barras’ Grade 4 classes have started a weekly outdoor program to help us learn about early European explorers. For 5 weeks we went/ will be going outside on Wednesday afternoons to learn about skills that these explorers would have had to learn when they came to North America. We will be looking at forest herbology, orienteering, indigenous knowledge, and team work - to name a few. The outings will take place close to school (Maiden Lake, Old Stumpy, & Elk River trail) and we will be walking to our location each week. 

12. Science Outside!Throughout the year Mme. Danielle and Ms. Barras' Grade 4 classes spend a block each week playing games and completing activities outside to help enhance their Science program and create shared experiences in our local environment. So far this year we've explored our habitat and biomes. A couple of examples of games we've played so far: Camouflage, students experienced the need for animals blend in with their environment for survival. Food Chain Rock, Paper, Scissors- students moved up and down the food chain with each rock, paper, scissors battle they faced. The goal was to move from hawk --> snake --> frog --> grasshopper --> grass.