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Introducing Mystery Class #1 Vancouver, Canada 49.217 N, 122.692 W     Greetings! We are students at the grade 5 level from the Vancouver International School - Greybrook Academy. We have been working together with Mrs. Hansen, our computer teacher and IT Coordinator, on the Mystery Class activity, and we are happy to "meet" you at last! Do you see what's on our wall? We participated in the Mystery Class Contest too, trying to find the other nine secret sites. Our School  Our school is located just outside of Vancouver, Canada, in a small community called Pitts Meadows. As you can see from this photo, we have beautiful views of the mountains near our school. Last year, we participated in the Mystery Class activity and searched for the secret sites just like you.This year we searched for the other nine classes, but we didn't search for the tenth because it was us. We were very excited to actually be one of the secret Mystery Classes. And now we're pleased to finally be able to share some information with you about our class, school, city, province and country. To give you a little more information about Greybrook Academy, it is an independent, non-denominational, co-educational day school, and provides a high quality international education for all elementary students between ages 4 and 13. This is the entrance to our school We are lucky to have small classes with between 10 - 18 students. Our language is English, but each of our students has a Spanish class everyday. We have teachers who have taught in various countries all around the world. We stay very busy because we have an extended school day (8:30 - 5:00), and we enjoy various after-school activities between 4:00 - 5:00pm. In our Grade 5 level,we have some favorite classroom activities and experiments. We love using our laptop computers for various activities at school (including Mystery Class!). We also enjoy rock climbing on the climbing wall located in our gym. One of our recent favorite books is called Esperanza Rising by Paul Munoz Ryan. Recently, our grades 5 -7 students had a very special international experience when they traveled to an International School in Tanzania, Africa to help build a school. They brought over 500 mosquito nets with them to give to children in local villages. Although the Greybrook Academy is a fairly new international school, it has a truly international curriculum drawn from the best elements and practices of the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (IBPYP) and British Columbia (BC) Provincial curriculum. Our City Our city, Vancouver, is located in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. Take a look at this map of our province of British Columbia, and you can see Vancouver at the bottom center of the map. The population is 583,267 for Vancouver proper and 2,208,300 for Greater Vancouver (2005 estimates). A resident of Vancouver is called a "Vancouverite." We feel very lucky to live in Vancouver, because there are so many fun things to do all year around. For example, in the winter you can snow ski on the local mountains, and then in the summer you can swim in the ocean and various lakes . We really like to go outside here in Vancouver. That means lots of hiking, biking and walking along all the local trails and dyke systems. Here are photos of some of us skiing, and some of our teachers skiing too. We're VERY excited because Vancouver will be hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics, and we've already started to count down. This will be the third Olympics for Canada, but the first one hosted in British Columbia. Go Canucks Go! Plus, we are also HUGE hockey fans here, and currently, our hometown team (The Vancouver Canucks) are in the second round of the playoffs to try to win the Stanley Cup! Go Canucks Go! Vancouver is part of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD), which is the largest metropolitan area in western Canada and the third largest in the country. Vancouver is also part of the larger Lower Mainland geographic region. Our Country Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, occupying most of northern North America. Extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, Canada shares land borders with the United States to the south and to the northwest. Inhabited first by Aboriginal peoples, Canada was founded as a union of British and former French colonies. Canada gained independence from the United Kingdom in an incremental process that began in 1867 and ended in 1982. The government system in Canada is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary democracy. This means we have a monarch, in our case Queen Elizabeth II of England. But we also have elections for our legislature and our Prime Minister. As you can see on the map above, Canada has ten provinces and three territories. Canada is a bilingual and multicultural nation, with both English and French as official languages at the federal level. Canada is a technologically advanced and industrialized country. It has a diversified economy and abundant natural resources. Trade with outside countries is important, particularly with the United States, with which Canada has had a long and complex relationship.  Would You Like to Write to Us? If you want to correspond with us, you can write to Mrs. Hansen at this address: Mrs. K. Hansen E-mail: khansen@greybrookacademy.com IT Coordinator VIS-Greybrook Academy 18477 Dewdney Trunk Road Pitts Meadows, BC Canada V3Y 2R9