Kaleidoscopes and a Crow Funeral

September 30th

As the days grow shorter, and the rain continues to fall, a little sunshine is appreciated here on Haida Gwaii. Today was stunningly beautiful, and my walk to school began with a brilliant pink sunrise.  I knew that I wanted to take the children outside this afternoon, and we planned a beach walk and a trip to the library.  As the older students took their turn visiting the library, we finished making kaleidoscopes out of papier-mached toilet paper rolls, glitter, beads, and sheets of mylar.  To demonstrate how they work, I taped three mirrors together and placed them over a sparkly piece of plastic so that the kids could observe and document the repeated patterns they created.  They were mesmerized, and one of them exclaimed "It looks like a hundreds of rooms!" and also decided that the repetition of cubes and triangles reminded him of a city.  One little boy took the mirrored triangle over to a wall mirror and pressed his face against it.  Another boy began laying pencils inside the triangular prism and noted the patterns they created.  The kaleidoscopes turned out amazingly, and we figured out just how many pinches of beads and glitter to add to create the most interesting designs.  As we finished up, we went outside with sheets of construction paper and a variety of interesting objects, including scissors and pattern blocks.  We arranged them on the construction paper in the brightest patch of sunshine we could find and waited to see if the sun would bleach the paper.  I was unsure whether it would work, and thought that the wind might blow out papers away, but we were pretty excited to see the results happening very quickly.  As we waited, we grabbed buckets and walked down the beach  to collect crabs.  We have been talking about 'gentleness' and the children had to be reminded to be gentle with their crabby friends.  We returned them to their rocks and headed for the library where we spotted a dead crow on the side of the road.  

All of the kids stopped and stared with concern at the dead animal and began to wonder what had happened to it.  "Maybe it fell from the post", "Maybe it was a baby and it was trying to fly", "Maybe it was shot" were a few suggestions the children came up with.  The bird had a visible hole in it's side, but it was unclear what had happened to it.  As we looked up, we noticed a group of about ten crows sitting on the telephone wires overhead, and I told them about the mysterious crow funerals that I had read about.  We silently wished our friend well and headed off to the library followed by a visit to the park.  The kids have been very interested in butterflies and birds lately, so these topics will likely guide our research in the weeks to come.  Until next week!  xo