How a PolarTREC Teacher Makes a HUGE impact with Polar Day!
PolarTREC alumni teacher John Wood organized a Polar Day at his school and it was a great success. This event is part of his ongoing commitment to sharing polar science with his students, many years after his expedition! Here is John's synopsis of the events, with some photos and an image from the newspaper:
"We ended up having 980 kids and parents coming through. We ran the entire event on a Saturday from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm. We pre-sold "passports" which the kids carried with them and received stamps from each station the took part in. Passports were also sold at the door. We had 3 main parts including activities, speakers, and food. The food began at 10:00 with donuts and hot cocoa. By 11:30 we had a food truck with hot items and a shaved ice truck ready to go. At the same time we began selling "Klondike" bars and "Eskimo Pies", and one of the stations was cookie decorating. There was two keynote speakers, one at 11:00 and the second at 1:00.
The stations were set up in classrooms. We had activities for the smaller kids such as making snowy owls out of pine cones and snow globes with penguins and polar bears in plastic jars. For some older kids we had sled building from cardboard and rope, games on adaptations, ice cores, and food chains. The local "ExplorOcean" center also had ocean centered activities. In the meantime we had run a polar art contest for all the grades with art on display and my students displayed and talked about some of their polar projects to the people walking by. Of course we had a painted backdrop where folks could put on the survival clothing and take photos. We even had a retired icebreaker captain sharing stories.
It was a very fun and nice day. Many of the activities came from the PolarTREC site, the "Polar Sciences and Global Climate" book by Bettina Kaiser, and from our elementary science person."