Talks R us...
It was hazy when we got up and the conditions did not improve over the day. It was cold today (-35 C) so I was very happy that it takes only about two minutes to get from the hotel to the school (if you walk slowly). It almost took longer to put on our Arctic gear than to walk between the buildings.
After recess, I gave the general talk on ACE and the Arctic campaign to all of the classes. We had a pretty good turn out of students and staff. I had a few volunteers when I asked for people to participate in the presentation. The best was when I needed someone to draw a picture of the rocket that would launch a satellite like ACE. I was not having any luck getting any of the students to try so Peepeelee (the K-2 teacher) volunteered to do this. She drew a classic "Delta-type" rocket so it played in perfectly to the video showing the launch of SCISAT-1 using a Pegasus rocket. I had some good questions from a few of the students so I hope that if there are any more questions they will get asked during the classroom presentations.
It was another busy afternoon of talk planning after a lunch of macaroni and cheese. We finished the talk for the Junior class and went on to work on the Grades 3-4 and K-2 presentations. For the K-2 class, we are going to talk about weather so we need to update the pictures to reflect the meteorological instruments used in Grise Fiord. We went to visit the Hamlet Office and introduce ourselves to the weather observer. It turns out that on Mondays the office is closed so we got to meet a few people (and give out ACE pins and Arctic campaign, CANDAC and PEARL stickers) and made plans to come back tomorrow. We got some more pictures to augment those taken by Tobias on Sunday afternoon. After a quick visit to the Co-op for some stamps, Jeff, Dejian and Tobias headed up to the airstrip to get a picture of the windsock and went back to get working.
On the way home, Dejian, Tobias, and Jeff stopped in at the Sustainable Development Office. In Nunavut, the big part of sustainable development is about managing resources like wildlife. So, they met with the officer and had a great discussion about the animals that are found in the area. I think the hit of their visit was seeing the collection of "unique" animal parts in the storage freezer. I didn't hear about anything else from the time they got back until the end of dinner.
We are finally ready for the Junior class tomorrow and hope that there will be Sun for the spectroscope activity.
Best regards,
Kaley.