Week 5 = cooking marathon !!

Hello and welcome back!This past week was our final full week of classes and we truly can’t believe it. It feels like only yesterday that we were getting lost finding grocery stores and consistently falling into large snow banks (although let’s be real, that still happens daily).This week’s lessons focused on bullying and building healthy friendships with our primary students, and suicide prevention and coping strategies with our older students.The younger students were amazing in talking about what a good and bad friend can look like, and created awesome thank you letters to recognize someone special in their lives. It was so sweet to see all of the people that are important in our student’s lives, and we loved seeing them give their letters to teachers and friends around the school.With our older students, we talked about self-esteem and recognizing signs our friends are sending that they need help and support. All of our students were so respectful and open during these difficult discussions and we had lots of really positive conversations about everyone’s individual talents and how we are all stronger when we work together as a community. We were especially impressed with the boys at the rehab centre as they demonstrated some awesome acting skills as we went through skits about how to talk to a friend who we think might be going through a difficult time.In addition to an awesome week of lessons, we also had the chance to spend a lot of time with our students outside of school. We started off the week with a trip to the arena for some skating with the Grade 3s and 4s on Monday afternoon.Our students continue to skate circles around us with their impeccable skills, but they have proved to be excellent teachers and have shown us the ‘proper’ way to stop on skates (an improvement seeing as this previously meant just slowly crashing into the boards for us).On Wednesday, we got to take part in a cooking class at the high school, and had a great time making (and eating) quesadillas and carrot cake with the students. Sophie is now a carrot cake convert, but that also might just have something to do with piles of cream cheese frosting, yet to be determined. It was an awesome night full of dancing and eating, as well as being educated about what is cool with the teens these days. So, have no fear, your Sal Pals are now not only snazzy, but hip as well.On Friday, we hosted our second girl’s night, but this time with a pizza party twist. We had so much fun making pizzas and chocolate chip muffins with all the girls, and definitely think that Gordon Ramsey should watch out for the future chefs of Salluit. We were also so grateful to our friend Alex who helped make some soap with the girls, so they were all able to go home with their very own emoji-themed (see, we told you we were hip) soap.We rounded off an incredible week with a walk with some of our younger students to Salluit 2 (a secondary housing area down the road) and a very fun picnic/hide-and-go-seek session on Sunday. It was so much fun to get to hang out with all of themHeroic Health moment:As part of our lessons with our older students, each class created an Inukshuk built of paper rocks on which the students wrote qualities/skills they have, and the names of people in their own support networks. We were especially impressed with the work that our typically rambunctious Grade. 5s put into each rock. We talked about how if one rock is taken out of the Inukshuk, then the whole structure would fall down, and how in a similar way, we are all important and valuable in creating the structure of our community. Our favourite moment was when their teacher decided the best place for the Inuksuk was on the ceiling and helped put it up with all the student’s names above our heads.Fabulous Funny moment:We were so excited to host our second girl’s night after all the fun that we had during the first one. We decided to plan a pizza party and thought that making homemade pizza dough would really take the night to the next level. However, after 4 hours of rolling mini pizza doughs, we decided that perhaps our dreams had been a little ambitious. With our arm muscles aching, we (and other teachers that stopped by) couldn’t help but laugh at the site of us frantically rolling out 20 individual pizzas in preparation. Thankfully, the girls loved the pizzas and our hard work payed off, but we both now have the utmost respect for all pizza chefs out there (and think that we’ll leave the work to Dominoes from now on).Stay snazzy!Your Sal Pals