NYO

Well it has sure been another couple of busy weeks here. We thought winter was here to stay. The temperature turned very cold and we had around 5 inches of snow. However, this week the sun came out and mixed with some showers, melted all our snow away. It is now a huge mud pit again; but we are happy to be putting our winter coats away for at least the time being and have gladly replaced them with our stylish mud boots!

Due to the nice weather we decided to take a walk the past two days. The pictures that you see here are from our walk out by the Bering Sea. We walked with a student from my class. While we were down there we met up with Dirk, the 7th grade teacher and his dog. These are pictures of his dog chasing birds on the water/mud because it was low tide.

School has been going well, but it is busy of course. We are getting ready for another round of parent teacher conferences this coming week. This time around they will be student led, which I have never seen before so it will be a new experience for me. We also have Halloween this week and all of the kids are really hyper and excited about it!

This past weekend we went to a NYO (Native Youth Olympics) meet that was held in our school. All the kids from the surrounding villages that are in NYO flew out to our school. The kids then camped in our classrooms for the night and performed in such events as the Alaskan High kick, Seal Hopping, and other various events. It was amazing to see these kids perform and the strength that they had. The one event that we stayed for the longest had two of Jimmy’s students performing in it. The kids could only use one arm to hold themselves up and kick a soft ball with their feet. The ball was then raised and if you couldn’t touch is with three chances then you were out (similar format to high jump in Track & Field). Jimmy’s students both did awesome, and came in 1st and 2nd place overall in the event. Our school took 1st place out of all of the other schools.

Other than that not too much has been happening out here. Jimmy had quite and experience the last two weeks teaching his physical education class how to square dance. He himself doesn’t know how to square dance, but took on the mission. This week his kids got to teach the 3rd graders through the 5th graders how to do it. It was quite chaotic, but it was funny to watch my kids bowing to their partners and joining hands with a member of the opposite sex. They were totally grossed out and tried to be the farthest they could from one another.

In less than eight weeks we will be traveling on four different planes and driving 5 hours to get back to Newberry. We are very excited to see our friends and family again! I hope that all the readers are doing well and that you are enjoying your fall weather! Get outside and enjoy the trees and nice weather for me. They are both something that we don’t have around here!