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.

Wait, what was that last thing you said?

In the announcements after school yesterday, the secretary warned us all to be careful if we were walking home because five polar bears were spotted heading into town.

The excitement of living at the top of the world!

Wordless Wednesday

Getting Colder

The ocean has started to freeze up some more. It's not totally frozen yet, but there are lots of icebergs floating around and some patches of ice across the water. I NEED to get out and get some pictures this week before it freezes completely. This week we are supposed to finally see some temperatures in the single digits. I don't think it's really been below the teens yet (at least not much, if at all) so we will start bundling up more.

Mr. Tundrateacher and I both have heavy parkas with fake fur ruffs around the edge of our hood. These help keep us warm. When we are going to be outside for an extended period of time (like walking somewhere or out for an activity), we wear Carhart overalls to keep us warmer. We both have decent boots, heavy gloves, and knit hats with flaps over the ears for protection against the wind. Some teachers who spend a lot of time walking outside get crampon type things to clip onto their boots for better traction on the ice.

In honor of our snowy flighted friend, this week's challenge is to learn three interesting facts about the snowy owl.


**Special note to my New Zealand reader: If you email me at the address on the right, I can give you more information about finding teaching jobs in Alaska (if you are seriously interested).

Great Sighting!

Yesterday, Mr. Tundrateacher and I saw our first snowy owl! We were driving by a small field near our school and Mr. T said, "Wait a minute, that snow pile is looking at us!" It was an owl just sitting in the middle of the field. As if that weren't cool enough, the owl then took flight and went pretty much right over our car. It was amazing! And quite huge. We were both surprised at its size. We definitely need to keep an eye on our dogs (particularly SoCo, the littler one) because we both thought the owl was capable of getting her if it really wanted to. Unfortunately, I didn't have a camera at the time, so I will post someone else's picture:


The picture from Wednesday is of an Arctic Fox. Sadly, we did not take that photo either. I actually don't think we've seen a fox here yet. We used to see foxes in the interior village we taught in a few years ago, but we haven't seen an Arctic one here. One of my commenters said the kids have been seeing them around town, so hopefully we'll catch a glimpse.

We're all glad it's Friday (although the teachers at our school have inservice tomorrow). We showed a movie as a reward for the kids who met their first quarter reading goals after school today. It was fun to hang out with them outside of class.

Tomorrow is also a big carnival sponsored by the Rotary Club at our district's elementary school. Lots of the kids and community members attend for games and fun.