Arctic Adventures: A great start to a hectic end

We finished our projects with Veera's grade 6s this morning. My group (which turned into one student working and the other two taking photos with someone's camera) made a line graph of their pyranometer data.

Lydia erasing the pencil marks on our graph.

Next we headed across the school to Pat's grade 1 class where we made a pictograph of the sky conditions (sunny, sunny with clouds, cloudy, rainy, or snowy) they saw when recording their measurements. We gave each of them an observation sheet (which had one of the sky conditions circled) and a piece of construction paper to draw on. One little boy started drawing clouds, despite the full sun picture being circled on his observation sheet. Anthony went over to help and asked, "What picture is circled on here?" The boy replied, "Rainy!" Anthony encouraged him, "It's not rainy. Point to the circled picture." The boy sat for a moment, obviously thinking. With his orange marker, he circled the rain cloud on the observation sheet, pointed to it, and repeated, "Rainy!"

Pat's grade 1's sky condition pictures.

After our break, we made a sky condition pictograph with Jeena's grade 2s. When we arrived in the classroom, many of the students were huddled over a dot on the desk, no bigger than a quarter--a warble. These squishy grubs (yes, I poked it) lay their eggs on caribou. As larva, they dig themselves under the caribou's skin and travel to the caribou's back, where they stay until the summer (when they break through the skin). When this warble moved, it looked like a slowly compressing and elongating accordion. Jeena said they can sting like a bee and it hurts quite a bit.

Grade 2 students huddled over a warble.

A warble from the side.

A warble from the front.

Before lunch we finished with Darlene's class. They taped their coloured thermometer and wind blade pictures from yesterday together for us, so today we made a really long sky condition pictograph. We made sure to include the temperature and wind speed on all of the pictures and glue them down in chronological order.

Darlene's grade 3's wind speed and temperature pictographs.

Darlene's grade 3's sky condition pictograph.

We spent an hour after lunch with Yvonne's grade 5 class. The two boys in my group came back to school late (the girl didn't come), but they made great progress on their bar graph! I was thoroughly impressed with both of them! We still have a half hour tomorrow to finish it up.

Next we went to Keriann's grade 4 class for a full hour; usually the grade 3s and 4s are broken into half hour sessions, but this was the best way to fit everything into the schedule. They were wild! While the supervising teacher was out of the room, some of the students were well behaved and coloured like we asked, others were completely lost and wandered around the room aimlessly, while most of the students made noises that I have never heard before as they half ran around the classroom. When the teacher came back, she flashed the lights on and off and they calmed down a fair bit. But I have to admit, I think all four of us were glad when the hour was up!

We ended the day in Caleb's grade 7 class. When we broke off to start projects in Caleb's class last time, there were only six students, so we split into two groups. Anthony and I took three students and Ashley and Jonathan took the others. Today there were 12 students, so our group doubled in size. At first it lead to chaos. Anthony and I trying to get six grade 7s to focus was comparable to training cats to heard sheep. Dave, the gym teacher who was supervising the class during our time, tried to help, but I feel like he didn't want to step over Anthony and my authority. So I made a quick decision; split the work of our trivia game into two parts, then assign three students to Anthony to make questions and three to me to make the board. It turned into a more manageable situation until one of my students ran out of paper to cut. He started snipping the scissors near my hair. "If you cut my hair," I warned, "I will personally escort you to Clyde or Dean" (the principal and vice-principal, respectively). The student continued to snip the scissors in the air, but not near my hair. Dave left momentarily, and shortly after returned with Dean. Immediately all of the students swapped to their best behaviour. It was an amazing transition! Dean walked around the room and interested himself in each project before leaving. We managed to get the trivia questions done (not with any answers...) before the home bell rang.

Caleb's grade 7's pyranometer trivia, mostly about clouds.

After school, Jonathan and I went grocery shopping for the dinner we are making Dave (the music teacher) and Pete tomorrow night. Ashley, Jonathan, Anthony, and I met up for supper and a couple rounds of Rummy before swapping photos and heading back to our rooms.
I really wanted to see the inukshuks up close and we will likely be busy all of tomorrow, so I went for a walk. Along my way I saw mountains in the distance. They looked so close! The inukshuks are covered in graffiti, but they are still marvellous and huge--my shoulder only reaches the top of the second rock!