Wow! Two straight weeks with an update! I must really be procrastinating from something...

It was a busy week this past week, and with both of us feeling under the weather, we were happy to see Friday roll around. However, there were plenty of fun highlights to share! To start off, an update on Wretch.

Here he is fishing. I have three ice fishing rods, so I felt comfortable sacrificing one to be a cat toy. All we had to do was wrap an elastic around the end of it and stick it in the crack in the couch, and it was instantly his favourite pastime. For some reason, Jill still wants to buy him real cat toys though!

Perhaps that's due to the next picture here - this is Wretch in full attack mode. Which is his mode of choice nearly all of the time.

In order to escape from wretched attacks and enjoy some nice weather yesterday, Jill and I went for a long walk around Pik.

Here is a little detour we took - Jill saw a side trail running off of the road, was not deterred by the whiskey bottle we saw almost immediately, and followed it until it turned into a dog trail. A dog trail is similar to a deer trail in places where dogs don't fill all niches in the ecosystem; similarly, a dog trail is hard for full-sized people to follow. We tried though, until we discovered that all possible ways back to the road would lead through somebody's back yard. At which point I got to be the new trailblazer.

Before wandering off into the bush, we went and visited the arena. There was a tournament going on, and I wanted to check out how it was going, and whether any of the teams that I sometimes play with were involved. No such luck, but I bet I could have caught on with a new team if I really wanted to - the four guys in green jerseys and one guy in a red jersey are the only players the Ice Bears had for the whole tournament! And considering how tired I was after the tournament last weekend with three lines and three pairs of defence, I can just imagine how they were feeling! I can also imagine what kind of shape I'll be in by the end of next weekend - we're going our to Ear Falls for a mini-tournament with the high school team, and I'll be refereeing all but one of the 12 games! HA! Jill's turn to update the blog next weekend...

This afternoon, Jill and I both spent time in our classrooms getting ready for this coming week. Jill might still be there, unless the Oscars have started already. I might go back, if the Oscars have started already! Nah, I'll just hide in the office and play on the computer. (I'm in the process of backing up my entire CD collection - I'm about half way through, so only another 160 or so CD's to go!)

Here's Jill showing off her nice classroom - she's done a really good job with her students, and has a very interactive and educational classroom. I, on the other hand, have everything taped down so it doesn't disappear!

This week I tried to teach my kids how to add with regrouping... I'm glad to say the two kids who knew how to do it already didn't unlearn the skill, but I'm not so sure how the rest of the class will fare... They did, however, enjoy the place value blocks we used! And it is kind of intentional that we built towers out of them - we were building towers to practice our measuring skills! The reason I look so surprised is that I forgot that I hadn't taped these blocks down again, and then all of a sudden, there was a tower that was taller than me!

The reason my student looks so happy here is that he just got away with building a giant tower when he was meant to be doing his work! Oh well, I'm lucky that my students are still young enough that whatever they do, they still learn stuff whether they want to or not.

The tower building project has been on recent success story in class 3C; another that my students are enjoying is the rapid growth of the plants in our class greenhouse! After our limited initial success (finding seeds of various sorts outside and planting them), we've done much better at growing plants from the seeds I "found" around our house! An onion that was starting to sprout, some potatoes that had developed minds of their own, some sunflower seeds intended for the birds, peanuts, corn, niger seed, and even lego found their way into this bin, and almost everything has sprouted at some point! Unfortunately, no sign of a lego tree yet...

It's nice to give the kids a taste of success in growing plants before we really get started on our plants unit later in the spring...

Speaking of spring, when you see a robin, think of us up here - I don't know if robins make it this far north, but we saw our first chickadee in quite a while just the other day!