Hello Boys and Girls,

Did you have a good week? By now you should have received the results of your NGSA mock exam. How well did you do? Learn from any mistakes you may have made. Keep working as hard as you can and pay full attention in your online classes though it may be tough sometimes. Did you do last week’s exercises well? How many Guyanese birds did you list? Have you been observing birds?

This week we will look at another type of animal. We will look at fishes. The first exercise for you to do is to name as many fishes found in Guyana as you can. Compare your list with that of a friend. Ask your teacher to have the lists displayed in your class. Encourage others to do the same. You can even have a competition.

Do you like to eat fish? Fish is very nutritious and good for you. Can you tell to which food group fish belongs? If you don’t know, find out. What nutrients do you get from fish?

Look at the different fishes below. Which ones do you know?

As you can see, fishes come in an amazing variety of colours, shapes and sizes. There are about 25,000 known species of fish. Fishes are aquatic. They live in water. There are three classes of fish. They are: i. the jawless fish, which doesn’t have a true jaw but a sucker- like mouth

and rasping teeth. ii. the cartilaginous fish, whose skeletons are made of cartilage, which is

not as hard as bone iii. the bony fish, which have skeletons made of bone. They are the most

numerous group.

What are fishes covered with? Yes, most fishes are covered with scales. Scales are little slightly round plates. They overlap each other. The scales provide protection and they always point backwards towards the tail.

Let’s look carefully at the parts of a fish.

Can you see the gills?

Ensure that you know to draw and label the fish.

Fishes have fins. Look at them carefully. Do the fins help them to move in the water? The tail fin or caudal fin helps the fish to swim forward with less friction. The fins at the top and bottom help the fish to move up and down. The paired fins - the pelvic and pectoral fins - help the fish to balance and to steer. The gill cover is also called the operculum. Not all fishes have operculums.

Have you ever observed how fishes breathe? Fishes breathe by gills. When they swallow water it flows over the gills and out over the gill chamber. When the water passes over the gills, oxygen is absorbed from the water.

Look carefully at how the fish opens and closes its mouth the next time that you see one moving in the water.

Fishes lay eggs. They lay eggs in the water. However, not all fishes lay eggs. Some eggs remain inside the bodies of the female fishes and hatch there. The baby fishes then leave the mother fish’s body alive.

Are fishes warm blooded or cold blooded? Yes they are cold- blooded. They actually adapt to their surroundings.

Work on the following;

What A______________________ of fishes Fishes live in______________________ One who sells fish is a _________________ One who catches fish is a__________________ An aquarium is____________________________ Do all fishes have scales?

is aquaculture?

If you can, catch a few fishes and look after them in an aquarium or a large bottle.

Read the little poem below.

Until next week, have fun fishing, Boys and Girls! Practise drawing the fish and naming its parts. Until then be safe, and revise for your next mock exam.

Hello Boys and Girls! I hope that you are keeping the word FOCUS as your motto. This week we will solve word problems based on Bills. You will work sums based on dollars and cents since this will also test your knowledge of Decimals.