Students at Rossland Summit School (RSS) shared their learning projects from the first term of the 2016-2017 school year at the school’s Winter Evening Gala on Thursday night.
Projects included a scale model of downtown Rossland constructed from gingerbread by Jessica Foster and Laura Jackman’s Grade 1 and 2 classes. The project was an opportunity for the students to learn about their community, and combined social studies with art, math, career and language arts.
Raffle tickets to win a section of the model were being sold at the gala, which was raffled off on Wednesday afternoon. Proceeds from the draw will allow Foster and Jackman’s students to install a gift cupboard — filled with things like bandages, tissues, soap, shampoo and kids’ mittens and socks — in Esling Park. The students had an opportunity to make a presentation before council this term as well, so they could ask for permission to install the cupboard.
Matthias Starzner’s class also learned about building to scale. The Grade 4-6 class has spent the past term learning about the Columbia River.
“For this part of the learning it was about … just getting an idea of which fish actually live between Castlegar and Trail,” explained Starzner. “So they found a list of fish and they started learning about the Latin names and all the different fish that live here. And then they sort of learned about what kind of habitats they like, what they eat. Where they could, we tried to learn about what First Nation connections they have.”
Students also learned about which fish were native species and which were introduced, and about the role of the northern pike in the ecosystem. Then they built the fish more-or-less to scale out of paper mâché (Black Press was able to help out with some extra newspapers).
Oliver Mamon, Grade 4, built a model of a peamouth. While working on the project, he learned “that the mom is actually bigger than the dad, and in the summer it lives in small streams.”
But it wasn’t just the K-10 students whose work was on display. Pre-kindergarten kids in the Rossland StrongStart program also had their winter wonderland artwork on display. The project gave StrongStart students the chance to use their fine motor skills and use lots of glitter.
“We started these in November because it wasn’t snowing and I figured, if we made it, it would come,” said Jamie Santano, facilitator for Rossland StrongStart. “And the day after we made some of these, it started to snow.”
The StrongStart program is for children zero to five years old. “They’re never to young to come to Strong Start,” said Santano. It’s a free, literacy-based, drop-in program for children and caregivers. It offers music, gym twice a week, visits from the library, and once a month there’s a visit from the Aboriginal infant development coordinator from the Circle of Indigenous Nations Society (COINS).
The program does require registration, which can be done at RSS. For more information visit Rossland StrongStart’s Facebook page.