Mi Vida Ocupada: My Busy Life!: Fish and more fish....

I don't talk too much about what I do at my job on this blog, but maybe I should share some of the reasons why I love my job as a gifted services specialist so much. For the past several years now I offer monthly "special topic classes" every Friday throughout the year. The classes are open to students who are not necessarily identified GT but have an interest in the class offered. Every month I offer a new class and have new students.

Did I mention that this month the special topic class that I am teaching to 3-6th graders is on Ojibwe culture?

The Ojibwe (aka Chippewa) are the group of Native Americans who lived in the Great Lakes region (Northern MN, WI, MI, and Ontario, CA) prior to European settlement (I am saying this as diplomatically as I can because I have very strong feeling for what actually happened to all of our indigenous tribes). Anyway, students have been learning a variety of things about Ojibwe culture and this Friday's class was all about how the Ojibwe moved to different camps each season, as they harvested maple sugar in the spring, fishing and hunting in the summer, wild ricing in the fall, hunting and trapping in the winter. I have a wonderful book that I use to illustrate what a typical year looked like for the Ojibwe prior to the mid 1800's. We discussed which foods that the Ojibwe found growing naturally in the region and then I had students try a variety of foods the Ojibwe would have eaten. For this class I specifically brought foods for the kids to try: apples, pure maple syrup (which is nothing like Aunt Jemima!), cooked wild rice and smoked white fish.

I wasn't sure which students would try the fish, but to my absolute pleasure, every single student in both classes tried the fish and enjoyed it! Even students who had never had fish before in their lives tried it and liked it. This fish was about 15 inches long and these kids ate every single piece of meat on this bad boy until there was nothing left but the bones! If you look at the picture closely, you will see that we are holding up the bare fish carcass. These kids are great, they made me so proud!

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Now as far as the "more fish" part of this post's title, I had a field trip today for my graduate course in teaching science. We got a behind-the-scenes tour of Underwater Adventures at the Mall of America and did a workshop on Project Wild throught the DNR. I took some video footage of some of the animals at the aquarium and I will post a video as soon as I can make it in iMovie.

Speaking of iMovie, I visited the Apple store at the MOA today after my workshop was complete and I am definitely going to buy the Macbrook Pro this upcoming week. I cannot wait! I have so much to learn about Macs but I know that once I get the hang of it, I am going to be so happy!