Algonquin students complete birch bark canoe

Grade 7 and 8 students at Algonquin Avenue Public School held an assembly June 24 where they handed over a nine-foot long model birch bark canoe to representatives of Fort William Historical Park in Thunder Bay.
The handing over of the canoe came just in time for Canada’s National Canoe Day, which was held June 26.
The students had been working on building the canoe for the entire school year.
“They made a smaller canoe, but the thing about the smaller canoes is they take just as much time to make as the bigger ones, it just takes less materials,” Darren Lentz, Grade 7 and 8 teacher and also vice-principle at the school, said.
The model canoe is about a third of the size of a typical canoe and was built in the high-end old Ojibway style.
“They learned history, they learned geography, they learned teachings about the land and they learned about Aboriginal culture,” Lentz said.
“When we started building the canoe at the beginning of the year, it brought the whole school together,” Nick Stelmachk, a Grade 7 student at Algonquin said.
“We learned a lot of stuff,” Stelmachk said. “We gathered a lot of the materials ourselves by going out into the bush to get them, even digging up the roots we used.”
The students also did a podcast of the process for building a birch bark canoe that will be available on the Fort William Historical Park website, which will teach others across Canada about birch bark canoe building.
“This was an excellent experience for the students,” Lentz said. “It was a mix of old and new technologies with students using tried and true methods of canoe construction and then using something new like a podcast to share this experience with other students across the country,” Lentz said.
The students decided to donate the canoe to the Fort William Historical Park, as a piece used for educational purposes in exchange for free field trips to the Fort.
“Elementary schools sometimes don’t have a lot of money to make sure kids get to go on field trips, so it was a great opportunity to make sure that every one of our classes got to go to the Fort and see living history,” Lentz said.
James Raffan, executive director of the Canadian Canoe Museum wrote a letter to the students at Algonquin and said there’s no better way to learn about canoes than to build one.
“Every other school in the country should follow Algonquin’s inspiring example,” Raffan wrote. “One of the reasons why the canoe is a wonder of Canada is people like Darren Lentz and his students at Algonquin Avenue School are keeping the tradition vibrant and alive.”
Stelmachk said the most important thing he learned while building the canoe was perseverance.
“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “It’s tedious work and if you mess up you have to do it over again…we put in hundreds of hours working on it.”