Learnin' those kids somethin'

Lately we've been doing some teaching and learning at home. And by "lately" I mean we have done 3 lessons, including 2 letters. And the second letter we started today. But I plan to keep it up. It's more of an activity for when we don't go to school for longer periods, than a scheduled class plan.

**I just remembered that we also did a Valentine's theme. So that's 4.

So, we started with the short "a" sound, combining English and Inuktitut.

The activities that we did with this included the prerequisite apple picture, with printing practice:

and the most all-encompassing activity I may ever come across - well, actually do, anyway.

These are, of course, paper chains with an Anchor at the end. First they decided on what pattern they were going to make by colouring lines on paper. The green links on Logan's chain and the yellow links on Liam's chain are the days of the week (in both languages). So, while they were following their pattern, and manipulating the strips of paper to make the chain, we were reviewing the days. They had previously coloured and cut out the anchors. Then they printed the word "anchor" to accompany the chain. Is that anything short of awesome?!

As a bonus, now that we have anchors on the wall, we can build on that with boats, octopus, water.... and fish. Which brings us to our new letter.

Luck of the 1/4 Irish

Last week we went to school twice: Tuesday and Friday. Tuesday the teacher's announced that we would be having game day then, instead of Friday. The adults and kids each played a game of Inuktitut Snakes & Ladders. I didn't win the adult game. Logan decided he would rather just play with his game piece, instead of putting it down, rolling, and moving. In the end, every player on the kids' side was within 1 or 2 of winning; it was just a matter of who would roll the magic number first. The die went around the group about 3 times. Finally, Liam rolled the 1 that he needed for the win. And what a win it was!

That's 4 juice boxes, a box of yogurt tubes, a bunch of bananas, watermelon slices, a doodle pad, a mini stapler and plastic hand clapper things. While you are looking, you may as well click to make the image larger so you can check out the prices on the watermelon and the stapler.

Now that you have recovered....

We went back to school Friday, and lo and behold, it was game day again. And of the 3 games, Liam and his partner (not me! but the lady he has adopted as his partner - they win more often than not) won one game. A smaller prize this time, but who's complaining.... Whose mom feels a bit of guilt every time we take one of these prizes home, because there are certainly people there who need them more than we do!

I'm pretty sure his motivation for picking this prize was the picture of a pie on the tub of lard. He lives in constant hope that his mother will make an apple pie with him. Better order some extra apples....

I beg to differ.

I read today that some climbers are coming to the Clyde River area to scale some rocks. It's going to take the three climbers 20 days to climb the rock face. This means that at least some of the time they will be sleeping hanging on the wall of granite. This climbing website states that "the main feature of Great Sail Peak is its NW face, which is a sheer 1150m wall," and that it looks like this:

Courtesy of Google Earth, I can see that Stewart Valley is about 100 km from Clyde River:

The red dot is Stewart Valley; the blue dot is Clyde River.

As awesome as sleeping in one of these

sounds, the part I love the most is that the article also states: "They hope not to encounter snow storms, which are unlikely in such a cold environment."

Really? Have they done their research? Can weather patterns differ that much within 100km in the Arctic? Because this was our front porch last week during a storm that lasted from Saturday night to Monday evening, that blew winds at least 100 km/h. At 8:30 PM we cleared the area of accumulated snow to start fresh.

9:54 PM	1:43 AM
Preparing to shovel at 1:47 AM.
Opening the door to put the snow outside would have been just plain dumb, not to mention futile.	9:28 AM

Knowing that our house, that is built on pilings drilled far into rock, really shakes when the winds get up that high, it doesn't seem like a brilliant idea to be sleeping hanging from a rock face while the wind howls and the snow blows.

Recent scenes of Clyde River

These are recent pictures of Clyde River, mostly from inside the house. It seems like whenever we go out for a truck ride, I either forget the camera or the battery. Therefore, they are a bit repetitive, but that's why you can scroll.

The snow drift up the back of the house.	It makes a very good wind/snow block now.
Sled dogs.	Sun dogs.
These pictures were taken a week apart.	There was a 2-day blizzard in between.