Manitoba First Nations Festival For the Arts

Yesterday and Today, Elisapee Ishulutaq, oil stick on paper  

The art festival trip was a complete success! We managed to fit in not only the festival but a number of other activities in the city on a limited budget. Hopefully this  becomes an annual event.

Tommy and his pencil drawings.

Chelsea with her pine marten prints.

Zoey and her Oji-Cree counting book.

Madison and her bird painting.

We brought a lot of artwork with us to Winnipeg.  Our school is very fortunate to have so many creative and supportive teachers who value the arts. Everyone seemed really impressed with the talent of our students.

Fox Lake presenting  "What the 7 Teachings Mean to Me."

Poplar River School presentation

Nelson House anti-bullying skit.

Each school was responsible for giving a presentation in the morning. Because we chose to bring students to present their visual art, we did not plan on performing any of the songs we did at our festival. Instead I talked a bit about our school's festival, the art we made, and showed pictures. Other schools spoke about their community, performed Red River Jigs, and one school performed two poems. We were really impressed with the hard work that went into these presentations.

Lunch break!

KES table one.

KES table two with chaperons Nick and Lorna.

Planetarium

Portrait drawing workshop.

Learning about traditional games.

Traditional games.

Students having their caricatures drawn. 

After lunch there were a variety of activities for the kids. There were stations for portrait drawing, traditional games, caricatures and Wilfred Buck brought his portable planetarium. 

Celebratory dinner at Montana's.

Table doodles.

Happy Birthday!

That night we went out to dinner at Montana's to celebrate. We even got to sing one student happy birthday!

These Rodney Graham prints are too perfect.

We finished the trip off with breakfast at Stella's and a visit to the WAG. We made sure to bring our sketchbooks so that we could draw some of the artwork on display.

Taking time to copy some Elisapee Ishulutaq prints.

Our students had such a wonderful time in Winnipeg. Opportunities like these are few and far between for Garden Hill. Hopefully this becomes an annual event for MFNERC. If you would like to read more about the festival you can check out their website.

Busy

A lot has been happening here these past two months. The school science fair is just a week and a half away, and our students are hard at work preparing their projects. We didn't have a science fair last year because of the school cancellations in January, so our students don't have the experience of grade 5 to fall back on. Working so independently is a new expectation and many of them had difficulties selecting projects and setting their own research goals. 

We seem to be getting the hang of things now. There are a few projects that stand a good chance at being selected for the Winnipeg science fair in March, and this year we are able to take 8 students! Front runners include building a simple robot and re-inventing the battery.

Our school was selected to participate in the Provincial Festival for the Arts in Winnipeg next week. I am able to take 12 students and 3 teachers to represent our school. The trip is next week and we've been scrambling to raise additional funds and plan. The trip will be similar to the science fair so I'll be taking two very similar trips to Winnipeg only weeks apart. It's a great opportunity but it's left me little time to think about much else.

Recently we've met some of the new nurses and have been spending time with them. It's funny that it's taken us over 2 years to talk to any of the nurses (they only live a 10 minute walk away) but I guess better late than never.

Ender and I often bring both classes together in either my room or his to do combined lessons. A few weeks ago after one of these combined lessons my students and I came back to our room find that a puppy had sneaked in and was taking a nap in the book nook. We have no idea how it got into the school, but one of my students thought it looked like her cousin's puppy and took it home with her. 

Christmas 2014

We preformed two songs for this year's Christmas Concert: What Are You Doing New Year's Eve and Hotel Yorba. We also made the greatest Christmas poster that has ever existed (Jordan's grade 2 class made a close second) and built a successful Santa trap.

2B's Christmas Poster

The Best!

Our students needed to put several smaller boxes together to make a big enough Santa trap.

Hard at work.

We hung the box from the ceiling using a pulley and questionable ladder safety.

Some were more helpful than others.

It got very cold in the last few weeks of school, and indoor recess can be really boring. To solve this problem we managed to get a ping-pong table a few times to hold a Tournament Magnifico!

Santa is coming get ready!

He's coming!

Don't worry, we freed Santa so you'll all get your presents tomorrow.

Merry Christmas!