Fabulous Firsts
From teaching to touring, movies and makeovers, as well as crafts and cooking, there is never a dull moment in Pickle Lake!
A lot of learning happened at Crolancia this week – both from us and by us. We have spent a good deal of time hanging out with the kids, getting to know what sorts of things they are interested in and where they come from. And, after so many lessons, we are starting to get a good feel for teaching in the classroom. We talked to the 1,2,3’s about teamwork, sportsmanship and feelings this week. The 4,5,6’s got a lesson on the science of substance abuse, which included some pictures of spider webs constructed by intoxicated spiders. This was a huge hit! The 6,7,8’s had the pleasure of seeing us three times this week: once to talk about eating disorders, a second time to go over teamwork and a third time to introduce our leadership booklets and cover the art of communication. In the latter lesson we passed on a rather difficult QHO activity – standing up in front of the class to make an impromptu speech for 30 seconds about random topics such as the Toronto Maple Leafs, baseball, and math class! One of our favourite lessons so far has to be goal setting with the high school kids. After explaining the process of SMART goal setting, we gave the students lots of time to start thinking about their own goals. It was really great to see what they came up with and we are hoping to do some career planning with them later on!
Pickle Lake continues to offer us some unique cultural experiences. This week, we had the opportunity to sit in on a special presentation by Canadian author, Caroll Simpson. She told us all about her community in northern BC and read one of her books, “The Salmon Twins”. We have to say, she was a fantastic storyteller and amazing artist!BUT there is a lot more to being a Peer Educator in Pickle Lake than teaching at Crolancia!! Our schedules are packed to the brim with after school activities and special events in the evenings. On any given school night you can almost always find us at the school playing floor hockey, dodge ball, knitting, or making crafts. Some highlights from this week also include: Movie Night #2 (Despicable Me), helping out with Track and Field training, (baton exchanges and starts ftw!) and Girls Night for Grades 1-4 (stay tuned for a special joint blog post on that!).And, in keeping with tradition, we have decided to leave you off with a list. This week was a week of firsts, so here we give you our Top 8:
- First Crafts and Cooking Club, where we started a new fad in Pickle Lake – bead animals!
- First Girls Club for grades 1-4, where we talked about inclusion and played our first ever game of Just Dance! (although it certainly was not our last)
- First after-school leadership program with the high school kids, where they started planning for after school floor hockey, a dodgeball tournament, a Crolancia vs. Missabay soccer tournament and the upcoming Spring Fling.
- First unsolvable Human Knot at our after-school leadership program. It took 15 minutes to get all but one person untangled. But they never gave up and were adamant not to cheat (despite our best efforts to let them)!
- First time anyone has not been able to find the Pickle Lake community centre, which, as it turns out, is only 50 metres from our house. We were going to volunteer at a free hot lunch program and we had to ask at the post office for directions!
- First time we got sick with the stomach flu (which is going around Crolancia) and then got locked out of the house because we forgot our keys in the morning! Thank you Team Mish for coming back to rescue us!
- First time the Toronto Maple Leafs have won a playoff game in 9 years!
Until next time,Team Pickle