Weekly Challenge

I am going to try to reinstate the Weekly Challenges on the blog. I will post answers on Friday.

We just got our sun back here in Barrow, so your challenge is to be able to explain why we have a period of 24 hour darkness and 24 hour daylight.

Now that it is sunny, I want to get out and take some photos of the frozen Arctic Ocean. It looks really amazing, like what you might imagine the surface of another planet to look like. It doesn't freeze flat like a lake or pond, but has huge chunks all over due to the currents below.

Have a wonderful week!

Long Time, No Post

I'm sorry it's been so long since I posted! Things have been very busy here. We had some pretty crazy weather during the last month. One day it dipped down to -46 (-71 with windchill) and school was actually cancelled due to the extreme temperatures. February is usually our coldest month, so I think we'll see more of it. We've been told that you can actually take a cup of boiling water in temps like that, throw it up in the air, and it will freeze before hitting the ground. We will try to do it the next time the temperature drops and video tape it if we can.

Our sunshine has finally returned. Wednesday was the first official sunrise since November, and everyone was ready for it. We will gain approximately nine minutes of sunlight each day now. Late February and March feel like normal days in the lower 48 as far as daylight goes.

I will also try to post more pictures now that the light is returning.

Here is a picture of Mr. Tundrateacher after shoveling snow for about 20 minutes in negative 25 degree weather:

Happy Holidays!

Just wanted to wish everyone a happy holiday season from the top of the world! We are on winter break (it's three weeks long, we return to school on January 7th).

We decided to stay here over break since it's tough flying in the winter in Alaska with two dogs. We have been relaxing and enjoying the time off. The weather turned really cold though--negative 30 for a few days! That seems to be the major cutoff when you feel the intense cold. Today it is warmer, at only four below right now.

So Busy!

Sorry for the sporadic posting again--things have just been so busy! We had our big basketball tournament this past weekend where the village kids came in to play our middle schoolers. The kids had a great time.

This week we have a band concert for our school on Thursday, and there is a big craft fair at the Inupiat Heritage Center this weekend. We are looking forward to checking out the handmade Inupiat Eskimo crafts. No doubt there will be a lot made with baleen, polar bear fur, fox fur, and much more.

Today in Inupiat class at school, the teacher brought in a seal and the class cut it up right there in the classroom. One of my reading students video taped the whole process, and she was trying to email the video to me. It's certainly not for the weak stomached, but it is quite interesting. The locals will eat the seal meat and use other parts for lots of different things.

Challenge this week: Find three facts you didn't know about seals.

Out of the Turkey Haze and Back to Work

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving break (to my USA readers) and are well rested after eating way too much! We had off from school on Thursday and Friday. Mr. Tundrateacher and I cooked a big dinner and had another teacher over to join us. Everyone made sure that people who were up here alone had somewhere to go for the holiday. We spent the day eating, relaxing, eating, watching movies, and eating. The rest of the weekend was pretty lazy for us, which was just what we wanted. We have three weeks of school now until our holiday/winter break.

This coming weekend is a big basketball tournament that is being hosted at our school. Kids from all the villages that are part of our school district come in to play. They are staying at the school while they are here. We will be running the school store during the tournament.

Also, Saturday is the annual craft fair held at the elementary school. I am hoping to get a chance to go and see if there are some native crafts to buy for gifts and for ourselves.

This week's challenge: Find out the names and population of the other villages that are part of the North Slope Borough.

Have a great week! And to my anonymous commenter on the last post--please feel free to email me. My address is over on the right.

And below is a photo from our Apple Mini Camp the other week--we were in costume from the play of "The Three Little Foxes and the Big Bad Polar Bear".

Darkness

We have lost our sun. The sun will not rise again until mid-January. It isn't quite "midnight dark" all the time, but it's not even really twilight-light.

Some people have trouble with the constant darkness. In fact, there's actually a name for it called Seasonal Affective Disorder, where people get very depressed and even have physical symptoms. We never really minded the darkness. The daylight in the summer is actually tougher for us.

I will try to take a picture at noon one of these days and post it so you can see how dark it is.

Apple Camp

Sorry I haven't posted--we were so busy last week with our Apple Mini Camp! Some people from Apple came up to help lead a short camp where the students went to training sessions on various programs like iMovie and GarageBand, then each group came up with a project. We showed the projects to the community on Friday night.

My class rewrote the fairy tale "The Three Little Pigs" and made it set in Barrow. They did a great job with it! Then we turned it into a reader's theater script and created a podcast of it in Garage Band with some still photos. It was lots of fun, and really exciting to see what all the other groups came up with.

This week we have school for three days, then we get Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving. Everyone is excited for the break.