Hazelridge Elementary School is a small rural school just east of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The school is situated in poplar woodland just at the edge of the Boreal Forest, where thousands and thousands of migratory birds nest each year. Students at Hazelridge often see bears, deer, foxes, coyotes, raccoons and many smaller mammals as well as many species of birds right in their own back yards! Hazelridge has around 65 students from grades one to six. They go to school in busses and on some winter days, there's so much snow that they get to stay home! 

Their school may be small, but it's great. They have access to computers and the Internet and learn all sorts of interesting things.  The teachers at Hazelridge are very dedicated, as are the parents.  This makes for quite a learning experience for the kids!  

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Wildlife Presentation: The Mountain Gorilla
Presenters:            Astrid and Joe MacLeod

We went to Hazelridge Elementary School and talked to the kids there about endangered species, particularly about the Mountain Gorillas of east Africa. We had a great time. We ate bananas and pretended to be gorillas for a whole afternoon. We looked at slides and movie clips and listened to music, and we talked about a lot of things. 

The teachers at Hazelridge school had been talking to the students about the environment and the problems wild animals face for a few weeks before we were due to speak, so everybody was full of information and questions. They had been searching on the Internet and looking at sites, reading books and encyclopedia articles and doing everything they could to try to stump us with their questions. Well, we were doing the same thing! We had something extra up our sleeves though, because we had been able to speak to Craig Sholley, the man who was the director of the Mountain Gorilla Project for many years. It pays to have friends in high places!  You can read about our talk with Mr. Sholley here.

We were pretty impressed by the kids at Hazelridge Elementary, and their principal and teachers. Thanks Hazelridge! We'll be back to visit you soon.



The Presentation:

We talked about all the reasons animals become endangered species and what that means.

When animals are endangered, it is because their numbers are dropping for some reason and there is a very strong possibility that they might disappear as a species. Many different people come together to try to stop this from happening.

The Mountain Gorillas are endangered because there are only 600 of them left in the whole world. They have been hunted by poachers, they have been forced from their territories by the spread of people and towns, they have become sick from diseases carried by humans, and recently there was a war in their area and some gorillas were hurt or killed.

You can read more about Mountain Gorillas and the project that has been created to try to save them under Endangered Species.

The students at Hazelridge School and their teachers learned all about endangered species and the problems that wild animals face in the world today. To read some of their thoughts and comments, visit other parts of KidSpeak.