Parents: There are still tickets to this amazing event on Saturday, 10:30-12:00. It's going to be amazing. Shelley just saw Landon Bryce's presentation and says she was blown away!
http://hirschacademyourvoices.bpt.me/ 


 Pardon my lateness on blog posts. Some of you know I am taking a DIR training class on the weekends. The class combined with the beginning of soccer season for my children (please explain why my son needs to practice 3 afternoons a week and have games on Saturday and Sunday??) makes completing an entire post, let alone one coherent though, a pretty daunting task.

So let's get down to business. You've probably heard by now that our once beautiful aquarium has become the scene of some pretty wretched crimes. In fact, one students said we needed to call in the "Fish Crime Scene Investigation Unit" to figure out what the heck was going on.

Wait, wait...let me throw some CSI Miami your way, because Erin and I have been rockin' it David Caruso style (sunglasses and all): http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/lets-all-watch-david-carusos-one-liners

Date: Somewhere between 3/15 and 3/17/2013
Setting: The Interrogation Tank
Suspects: The Sun Catfish
Crime: Murder in the fish degree
Victims: A whole bunch of guppies

The suspects

Wait, Amanda, guppies? You didn't tell us about guppies.
Yes, guppies. To replace the tetras and plecostomous we lost last week.

Let me go back to the beginning...

Remember all of those sexy fish photos from last week? We were so in love with our new pets. But, part of the risk of having pets in a classroom is that not all children are ready for the responsibility. We know the kids in our room and Heidi's room know to be very careful around our zoo, but sometimes we forget that our friends in the downstairs classes aren't quite such experienced zookeepers. A very quick younger child was upstairs one afternoon for after school Adventure Club ad managed to dump almost a whole container of food into the tank before the teacher could stop her.  We gave the tank a thorough cleaning and all of the critters seemed ok. Well, at first. Apparently it takes a while for fish to die from overeating--about a week.

 Last week, ugh, what a sad week it was. Every day we came in to find another dead fish. One after the other, almost all of our new babies were found floating. We had a funeral for one, but it just got to be too sad, so Erin and I gave the rest of them private, um, burials "at sea" if you catch my drift. The clincher was when our big, fat, handsome plecostmous died on Thursday. That was really tough. Some children had some pretty big reactions, which gave us the chance to talk through our feelings of sadness, anger, and confusion. Our only survivors were the crab and our 2 sun cat fish.

One of the Adventure Club teachers found out and felt terrible the fish were dying off. So she came in Friday morning with a new plecostomous, a new tetra, and a whole bunch of teeny tiny little guppies. And, hooray! Our tank teemed with life again! I kept my eye on everyone during the day, just to make sure no one was being aggressive. It seemed really peaceful. After all, we had been very careful in the beginning to only choose non-aggressive, community fish.

Not so fast, fish lovers. This morning when I came in: guppies gone.

See, now that doesn't make sense, we thought, the guppies arrived long after we had cleaned the spilled food from the tank. So there had to be another reason...

Wait a minute. That Sun Cat Fish sure is looking bloated.

Yep. It was the Sun Cat Fish. After some quick research, Erin reported that our beloved, whiskered fish love to chow down on little bitty fish. How did we not see this? These fish hang out in the aquarium castle all day, so we had never observed any aggressive behavior. But apparently these nocturnal guppy killers had big fun this weekend.

Well, we can't blame them. We practically invited them over for sushi (well, sashimi) by dumping a handful of delectable guppies in there for them to feast on. Needless to say, they are now living in another bowl. We haven't quite decided what to do with them...would anyone like some pet sun cat fish? Happily, we still have a tetra, a crab, a new plecostomous, and a very, very lazy snail.

Conferences for our class will be held on Friday, April 19th. Go ahead and mark your calendars! Here's the schedule. If you need to swap with a family, please contact them and then let me know.

9:00 Tani
10:00 Jakob
11:00 Bo
1:00 Annabella
2:00 Oliver
3:00 Aidan
4:00 Paul