Ptarmigan and Mother's Day and Promotion... Oh My!

Hello everyone! This week has been super busy because we are almost at the end of the year!!! As my first year of teaching draws to a close I feel all the same excitement for summer as I did growing up. It probably doesn't help that in about a month I'll be off to Disney World (dying of heat stroke no doubt). I've been planning a trip to Disney since I was probably five. It is time. Anyway let's get this blog party started, haha. I give you the cat pictures first, blow right on by them if you wish.

This photo sums up my social life on a weekend night eerily well...

I got Sonic a feathered toy as a peace offering after his vet visit, he loves it immensely and jumps three or four feet in his efforts to bring it down. I also won a fish at a cakewalk. Because the cakewalks here don't necessarily include cakes... or walking really.

Those were my personal pics... time for some Alaska! Everyone in the village seems to be going up in the mountains to a lake for hunting and fishing. I would love to go camping but am not really a hunter or fisher. Anyway our language teacher brought back this massive fish:

Inside was a smaller fish it had eaten:

And inside that fish was a tracking number:

 She also showed us how to butcher a ptarmigan, much to the delight of my kiddos... 

until the smell of the guts got to them!

After removing the stomach she blew it up and hung it to dry.

 Several middle schoolers were helping pluck and butcher the many ptarmigan.

Here it is all laid out. She also cut off the foot, you pull on the tendon and the toes move! 

My kids thought that was awesome.

Alrighty, we aren't butchering things over in my room, but we are doing some fun stuff. I had to create a unit for my school district integrating the local learning framework. Here is a tiny sample of things I made; the one on the left is a listening activity where they identify animals and colors based on a story I read, the one on the right is a page from a book they made that worked on number recognition.

It is finally warm enough for outdoor recess! We hit 32 degrees and took the chance to flock outside. Sledding seems to be the favorite activity.

 And of course our weekly art project! Though really this one was more of a craft... Mother's Day Cards!!! I actually had everything out and ready to go when I realized I forgot to make a sample! I made one quick as a wink, I think that the kids liked the sticky foam, we hadn't used it before.

But of course those were only the beginnings of the week... Friday night contained the big event.

Graduation

Technically the Kinders get promoted I guess, I'd never heard it that way until this week though... also the eighth graders and seniors graduated but I work with the little kids so they are the ones I took lots of pictures of!

CATCH-UP

AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Maybe I need to set myself a schedule on this blog too! Hmmm... How about Saturdays? With June and July being optional? Sounds good too me.

Notes for everyone:
I will be returning to teach in Kaktovik next year! I will be teaching the preschoolers once again but instead of interventions I will be teaching Kindergarten as well! I'm really excited about this because I'll have the exact same students (one of them is on the cusp of reading!!!), but I'm also nervous because Kindergarten!  I've always been wary of the K-2 grades because if you mess up there the poor kids have to play catch-up through graduation.

My cat just keeps growing! I was looking at pictures and he definitely doesn't have the adorable baby-face he had just a few months ago!

I am getting better at dealing with a classroom crises. This week one kiddo had a meltdown, but I didn't freak out, even though it seemed like the entire school played witness. In the past I would've been nervous to have all those adults around. I've gotten so much more comfortable in dealing with it.

We can go outside for recess again! Ahhhhhh... those glorious 20 minutes of outdoor time. Preceded and anteceded by ten minutes of dressing and undressing but I digress...

Now some fun stuff:
Way, way, way back in January I spent a couple days in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Here are some pictures from that:

Meet monstro. The birds up here are twice the size of any Southern birds!

YES!!! Thank you for the savings!

It took me forever to figure out how to start my rental (first one ever).

Tourism. Dining. Combined.

A mountain view from our hotel room!

Went for dinner with the other teachers at Ivory Jack's... and this is the only picture I managed to take.

Here is a photo of myself with the magnificent snowpile that inhabited the school 'lot' for most of the winter. I think that it was just a few days later that they moved it. It was a bit shocking to go out the door and not see it there!

One of the other teachers got a SMART board for her classroom. I saw the custodians hauling it out to the trash and KNEW I needed to save it for a couple of weeks. It served as a theatre/store. But undoubtedly the best part of the entire experience was painting it! Haha, clean-up was actually easier that day because no one took out any other toys. They were all terribly disappointed when I finally had to throw it away, but something else was coming. Something that was probably the most exciting thing to happen in class all year...

Caterpillars! I decided to gamble $40 on the odds that caterpillars could survive being mailed to the ends of the earth... they were five days late but ALL the caterpillars lived! (There was one fatality in the chrysalis stage, but that is common.) The kids loved the caterpillars and had to bring them to gym and snack-time. My favorite though was that they read the caterpillars books about butterflies to inspire them. So cute!

 This is my very cohesive bulletin board. I was so proud of it that I had to take pictures for you... then realize that part of the alphabet had fallen down.










We also did some of our first comparing and contrasting work to talk about the changes the caterpillars went through to become butterflies.

The students made baby pictures for the caterpillars. As you can see Frozen dominated the naming process! I was just going to name mine Eric but one of my girls pointed out that it sounds better with the whole name. Later the students helped me feed the butterflies fruit supplied by our wonderful cook.

Lots of other things have been happening of course. Including our pajama party where the class watched Frozen (they all love Frozen and the soundtrack I bought could easily be the best $20 worth of classroom money I have spent all year.) We also have begun being story writers... to varying degrees of hilarity. I end up getting eaten by monsters or blowing away in a blizzard in a fair number of stories.

Plenty has been going on outside of school as well. But all you want is cat pictures right???

Sonic loves the sun. He went a little bit insane when the sun finally started coming in the windows of our house. He rolls in sunny spots and pounces at sunny spots on the wall.

He also loves my laptop. He will chase the cursor from here to kingdom come! Earlier in the year I ordered cat food and cat litter. I ended up with almost exactly the right amount of food... but due to a series of mishaps I ended up with around 150 lbs. of cat litter! Unfortunately I never took a picture showing the full mountain of kitty litter. However, I've got this shot of Sonic sneaking a feast from the storage bucket. Alright, enough of my cat ;)

How about a walk on the lagoon?

We set out across the lagoon (don't worry the ice was plenty thick), our destination? The Vampire Boat!

Let's compare... August vs April

Now, to close out this super-post,

 I'll leave you with this beautiful picture of the sun dogs I caught at sunset the other day.