Selawik Summarized

I'm back in Kotz, and it's always a good feeling to look back on a village trip and all the work you accomplished. On that note, I recently got to tally program numbers for a whole fiscal year which reflects my work. The year starts October 1, so all the reports to summarize and justify work done during the last year are being compiled this month. This is my first full fiscal year showing all of my program work. After I entered everything a week or so ago, I took a shot of the summary or tally.



These are just school visits and don't include classes going to the visitor center or all of the summer programs. The first number is the number of participants. The second is a count of how many programs were given. I think I can say I've been working hard!

Back to Selawik, I gave 19 programs across 4 days, 2 of those being travel days. Each program is about an hour long. I haven't tallied the number of students, but I believe Selawik is second only to Kotz in size. Most grades in Kotz have 3 classes per grade level where Selawik only has 1, so the class sizes are actually larger. Here are a couple of pictures I was able to take. I get caught up in the program and don't tend to take many pictures, so it's not much. The 1st grade teacher did give me a cd of pics he took, but I haven't seen them yet. PreK, K, and 7th grade teachers also took pictures. Maybe they'll send me some.



These are highschoolers chopping up plants to make medicinal oils. The best thing was to hear one of the girls say it was more fun than she thought it would be...words not often heard from a teen!




After they followed the recipes and cut up a mixture of plants and added some oil (like olive oil), I heated them for several hours in a water bath. The next day they strained out the plants, put their medicinal oil in a little plastic bottle I had for each one of them and made a label with cool stickers I had made with magazines and a label maker.



Here I was getting GPS units ready to use with a large class of challenging 7th graders. It's a feat to teach a large group how to use a GPS in an hour, let alone this one, but we did it. I had already done a program with them, so I went in like a drill sargent barking orders and taking no nonsense, but it allowed us to stay on task, finish the activities, and get all of the units turned back in without incident. I had gone out the evening before and stashed several marked rocks all around the school. Then I entered the coordinates of one of the rocks in each of the units. Their last activity was to locate the rock and give it to me in exchange for a prize. They did well and liked it. The funniest thing to me, though, is how much they complain about the cold. You can't give in to their whining or you'd never get them to really learn the GPS. I just give them a hard time about my being able to take the cold better and I'm not even from the Arctic. (It's not even really cold yet, no snow on the ground even.)

Selawik presented some challenges, and I'm glad it's behind me for this year, but I think it turned out well, and I have some helpful notes to self for next year.

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