Ink Troubles and Bug Bags

Only three more weeks of school! With report cards and parent-teacher day behind us, Alex and I are counting down the days we have left before we go home for the holidays. Korra will be staying at a kennel in Winnipeg this year. She'll have Ollie to play with the entire time, so I don't feel too bad about leaving her for three weeks.

Alex has the kids working on classification in science. When Alex handed out the bags of toy bugs he suggested that they held live insects. He assures me their reactions were priceless.

 

In art we're working on relief printing. The ink I was able to get through the school is pretty terrible, and it will wreck the poly-blocks if we're not careful. This meant that I ended up having to ink up most of the blocks myself. Still, everyone got to print their image at least three times so I'll call it a win.

Next Friday we will be displaying our prints as well as performing three songs at our school's first ever Art Festival. 

November Is Almost Over!

November is flying by. Report cards go out next week and after that Christmas takes over until we go home for the holidays. Somehow we manage to find time to take Korra out for walks to the park (aka the playground). There are always other dogs around for her to play with so it makes getting enough exercise pretty easy.

This puppy was recently flown out to Winnipeg to be taken in by Manitoba Mutts. They foster dogs until they are able to find them good homes. I really liked this puppy (she reminded me of Korra for obvious reasons), so I'm glad she's on her way to finding the perfect family.

Ender and I did the Blanket Exercise with our classes  a few weeks ago. The activity uses blankets to represent the land we now call Canada and students played the part of the indigenous cultures and nations who live on those lands. The exercise goes through the history of treaty-making, colonization and resistance that resulted in the Canada we know today.

At first the blankets cover the whole floor, and students can walk or sit where they like. They can only stand on the blankets and not the floor, but that's not really a problem because the blankets cover the entire floor.

By the time we finish the remaining students (those who did not 'die' because of disease, relocation, or abuse) were confined to blankets just large enough to stand on (reserves). It's a really good activity though it needs some modification for younger, less patient students.

Our Reading Workshop has been going really well. Students are learning how to choose books and many of them are feeling motivated to actually finish them. Right now the Amulet series by Kazu Kibuishi is really popular.

And to finish things off we had our Bazaar of the year last night. Enjoy the face-painting photos.

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Dirty Paws

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to write anything. We’ve just been so busy! The lead up to Christmas is full of additional work and activities, Ender and I just finished our course work on Monday, and we have both been super busy adjusting our lives around her….

That’s right, she’s ours! After a waiting a few days and returning with a solid offer, the owners changed their minds. We’ve had Korra for over a month now.

Other than the pain of having to rearrange our Christmas travel plans (we are now driving) so far things are going well. And now that our course is finished I can really focus on training her.  

Earlier this year Ender ordered a reflector telescope. So far he's only been able to take the kids out once to see the moon. It’s been constantly overcast and on the rare occasions when the clouds do let up it’s too cold to be outside for very long. This week has been the coldest so far, dropping down to -40 with the wind chill. We will likely need to wait until the spring before an evening class can be arranged.

Because our class has been reading Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, Ender has been going over survival skills with our students. We spent an afternoon last week making a fire and cooking bannock outside. That day the Northern store held a snowman building competition as well. It hasn't been warm enough for packing snow for weeks so our snowmen were pretty pathetic.  

This year for the Christmas concert we are joining our two classes together to sing two songs, Ho Hey by the Lumineers and Dirty Paws by Of Monsters and Men. The kids are having a great time singing and we’re all really excited to perform. For Dirty Paws we have also created a shadow puppet show which I’ll be running while they sing. I absolutely love the puppets they have made so far.

There are only two school days remaining and then it’s time to go home for two weeks to visit family and friends.