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. 

KES Haunted House 2014

Ender started doing the haunted house with the grade sixes in his first year. Since then we've been putting this thing on annually and getting better and better every time. Because it's our last year at Kistiganwacheeng Elementary we wanted to give it our all. While the process has left me completely exhausted I also feel really proud of what we did this year. Let's take a tour...

We wanted to change the overall layout from last year. In the past years guests went through the haunted house and were chased out the way they came after they got their candy. This made the whole thing go very slowly. So we hung the tarps differently to create a one way route which streamlined the whole performance.

Lead by Mr.A dressed as a demon, guests were lead through a "spooky forest." We took down the ceiling tiles to make it seem less like a classroom, and then hung branches, cobwebs and purple lights. As you walk through the "forest," students on the other side of the tarp wall reached out to startle guests.

We set up the mask wall (Or as Ender called it the 'Wall of Things I've Killed') at the end of the forest. While wearing a mask, students put their heads through the holes and held perfectly still until people got close enough to scare.

We created a claustrophobic tunnel called the Terrifying Tunnel of Darkness ('And we call it that because nothing bad ever happens in there') using garbage bags to make a low ceiling. Again, the students reached out for feet from underneath the tarps.

At the end of the tunnel is the dragon with glowing eyes and a smoke machine inside. Ms. Jordan, dressed up in scars and a cloak, offered the kids a story about her dead husband (played by a student in a coffin on the floor) and candy for the road. When the kids reach for their candy a hand pops out from the bowl. Once the kids get their candy, they are told to hurry out before the spirit of Jordan's husband gets them.

On the way out there is one final scare from a student dressed as a scarecrow. We stuffed their outfit with newsprint so that if anyone poked them they would think it was just a dummy.

We had so much fun putting on the haunted house this year. We were able to raise enough money to cover the new instruments we bought for the school in October. I really hope that we can continue to do big projects like this at the next school we work at.

Hand-washing Is Important Because Our Hands Are Disgusting!

 This October we've been working on a lot of big projects. Alex is finishing up his unit on microscopic life with bacteria plates. He made the agar at home and the kids have been recording the growth of whatever was on their hands that day. It's pretty disgusting but in the best way.

Their observations include drawing the plate and writing descriptions of what they see. These are skills they can apply to their own science fair projects in the new year.

 

For Grandparents Day in September our class read "The Wednesday Surprise" by Eve Bunting. It's about a girl who teaches her grandmother how to read. Students then wrote about what they could teach their own grandparents to do. 

Both classes are working hard on their monster masks in preparation for the haunted house. This will be the third (and final) year we'll be doing the haunted house, so Alex and I really wanted to improve on what we accomplished last year. The students pictured here are working on a paper mache dragon head which will have glowing red eyes and spew smoke.