Last week of teaching and learning.

Here we are in our last week and it is bittersweet. I am really excited to get home and see Ellis but I am going to be sad to leave this amazing place and all the great people we have met.

Monday I taught part of the Rainforest walk. The classes do a learning chain where I (the instructor) teachs something about the forest to a small group then they teach it to the next group, which I will then take further up the trail to teach something  else. Each group is responsible to teach the others about their item (e.g. red huckleberry plants). It is super fun and I will try to incorporate this into my teaching somehow. I really loved this but it would take a few times to get comfortable with what I am explaining to the kids – fun to be outside teaching!

Tuesday was amazing!  I started the day teaching another invertebrate diversity lab to grade 8s, which went really well. Then I followed the same group in the afternoon to do Oceanography (collect plankton and take ocean data). I helped Hillary teach this lesson.  All great BUT the best part was that we forgot our equipment to take ocean data at the head of the inlet so we had to come back rather fast to collect it and do ocean data elsewhere.  What am I getting at??  Well… because our schedule changed we just happened to be at the right place at the right time to see a pod of transient killer/orca whales swim by.

YES!! So cool! Some of the kids had never seen any kind of whale so this was really special for them.  And the whales were not just swimming by – they were spy hopping and splashing their tail flukes and taking their time swimming around in the channel in front of us.  There was a very large male and a mom with a baby.  I have seen orcas before, but not that often, and I thought it was cool that I was seeing “transient” whales. These only stay on the west coast of the island – they also only eat seals and sea lions. In comparison, the “resident” orcas live in the Georgia Strait and only eat salmon. Very different and may be, in fact, a different subspecies.  So for me, a really special treat.  BTW- orca whales are actually dolphins not whales, and they are the largest dolphins of all.

We finished the day with a trip on the ALTA to do another ocean dredge – my last trip 🙁   One student

said it was “the highlight of the trip”  It really is a great addition to any field trip. We found big and very small sea cucumbers, lots of sea stars, crabs and urchins.  There is so much life it’s mind blowing sometimes.  I could go into a conservation rant here but I won’t.  I will say that I am not eating seafood anymore (that’s to counteract the over-fishing and by-catch that occurs) and am MUCH more aware of the plastic I buy and throw away – plastic is killing the oceans, and the oceans effect all of us.