Here comes the sun...

Another busy week at WMS!

I started running with the track team during Morning Wake Ups - a great program which gets students active and focused before the start of classes through 20 minutes of daily physical activity at the beginning of each day. Since I have the "sweeper" role for this activity, it's more of a run / walk situation than a run proper, but it's fun to be outside in the morning with the kids. I'm helping out with the track and field team after school on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Doing As, Bs and Cs with the WMS track team. It may not look like it here,
but there was a biting northern wind blowing through YK on this day. Brrr.

This week, the students worked on the District Wide Write (DWW) - a Yellowknife Education District No. 1 (YK1) writing assessment for students from grades 1 to 8. Written three times a year (the May assessment is the third and final instalment) the DWW provides a diagnostic tool for teachers to help target instruction, as well as a means to track student growth and improvement. This year, the genre for the DWW is personal narrative. I feel fortunate to be able to see this roll out while I'm at WMS. Next week, I'll be part of a team of teachers who will work together to evaluate the DWWs through moderated marking.

Jobmatics' Smart Focusing, an initiative supported by Northwest Territories Education, Culture and Employment (ECE), also started this week. It's another one of the programs at WMS geared to adolescent learners and it looks like I'll be able to see this program run in its entirety during my internship. The program helps grade 8 students reflect on their own skills and provides tools, skills and strategies for work and learning. I'm particularly interested in how the program will position the current work environment to students (where most people will work at, or in, more than one career over the course of their working lives).

I always think of education and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson's excellent 2006 TED talk, "School is Killing our Creativity," in which he observes that educators and education specialists do not know what jobs will look like in five years, let alone 50. We cannot predict how work, culture and technology, the environment and the economy will change. Sir Robinson suggests that, in this ever and quickly changing world, what we can do is give students the tools and models for comprehending and navigating change. This means cultivating our student's inherent sense of creativity and curiosity.

I'm probably sounding like a broken record, but there's a lot going on at WMS! Highlights from this week include: 

• teaching a review of figures of speech (hyperbole and personification) to a grade 8 class who are in the middle of a poetry unit and about to embark on writing their own poetry.
• learning how to play Dene Hand Games in physical education class. The grade 8 and grade 6 students were very patient with me as they tried to teach me this game. 
• connecting with the school's guidance person about my interest in counselling. Our conversation is an ongoing one, as students often stop by to speak with him while we are chatting. 
• meeting with the librarian about the school's library and helping out here by going through all of the English language books and pulling all of the old and / or damaged books and flagging all of the books for a classics section and a picture book section.
• attending the information night for the grade 5 parents and students who will be attending the school in the fall.
• Greaser Day. Grade 8 students are reading S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders for their novel study. This week they screened the film and showed great school spirit by dressing up as greasers and socs.

My hours for this week:

Monday and Friday - 8:15 a.m. to 3:30 p..m

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - 8:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

I continue to explore Yellowknife - I feel like I have so much to do and see and not much time left! This weekend I walked around Old Town, which is part of YK's waterfront on Great Slave Lake.

View of Great Slave Lake from Old Town. The lake has started to melt but people still feel comfortable biking
and snowmobiling across it. Me? Not so much. I continue to admire the lake from the shore.

Yellowknife Cultural Crossroads decorates a stone hill along the road that leads into Old Town. The project is a collaborative work of Metis, Dene, Inuvialuit, English and French participants and is
dedicated to all peoples of the North.

Old Town, now home to some galleries, restaurants and several historical buildings, has a colourful past. It was a bustling boomtown (tents and log cabins) of suppliers and outfitters that supported the gold trade. This is also where you'll find Ragged Ass Road (as immortalized as the title of Tom Cochrane's second solo album).

I attended the 30th annual Yellowknife Trade Show, a huge community event with an estimated attendance of 11,000 people... pretty good considering the population of Yellowknife is 19,000. I also participated in a Zumba fundraiser for the BHP Billiton Relay for Life team (for the Canadian Cancer Society).

Zumba fundraiser. (And yes, we're in the WMS gymnasium - go Wildcats!) 

The days are getting longer - there's almost 19 hours of sunlight now. During the "nighttime" hours (11:30 p.m. to 4:45 p.m.) it's still not completely dark. (!) My sense of time is completely off... I'll think it's 3:30 in the afternoon and it's already 8:30 p.m. and I find myself wide awake at 2:30 a.m. A quick aside: when my sister first moved to Yellowknife, we would often tease her that she would get Midnight Sun mania because of all of the sunlight in YK in the summer. I don't think it ever affected her in a major way, but it sure has affected me. (We're going to put a couple of blankets over the window blinds tonight.) However, save for the dark circles under my eyes, I think it's pretty amazing and cool how long the sun shines here.