Canada Research
Mrs. Hackman's Class

The project started with the children and I sitting and discussing what we already knew about Canada. On chart paper I recorded their contributions. I then went to our school library and the Edmonton Public Library to get books about Canada.

The children looked through the pictures in the books to see what they could learn  about Canada through the pictures.

It was in these books that the children discovered art work by Ted Harrison. They were fascinated by the bright colours. so back to the library for Ted Harrison Books. The children enjoyed looking at his pictures as well as listening to the stories. I read the following titles by Ted Harrison: A Northern Alphabet, Children of the Yukon, and O Canada. We also looked at the pictures in the following titles: The Cremation of Sam McGee and The Shooting of Dan McGrew. We watched a video on Ted Harrison where he discussed the source of his art work and his technique. The children and I discussed the source use of the bright colours that occur naturally in the northern lights. We created Ted Harrison artwork and wrote text to go with their pictures.

A visit to Ted Harrison's official website (www.tedharrison.com) gave us more information about Ted and his choice of colour in what is normally thought of as a colourful place. An art centre was set up in the classroom. The centre included bright coloured markers, all the Ted Harrison books to look at for inspiration and paper. The instructions were simple. Look through the books for ideas and draw a Ted Harrison style picture. All the children visited this centre and drew pictures. They chose one to have mounted and dictated a description of what was happening in the picture.

One of the reasons Ted Harrison uses bright colours in his artwork is due to the northern lights and the colours within. One of the children had a book at home that had very simple textual information about northern lights. He brought it in and I read it to the class. This sparked our interest so again we were off to the library to find books about the northern lights. We also found and read the book The Arctic Five by Elinor J. Pinczes. (available through Scholastics) This is a simple counting book that has arctic animals gathering in one place to watch the beauty of the northern lights. We visited a website about northern lights and shows a multitude of pictures of the northern lights. (www.geo.mtu.edu/weather/aurora) This website was a link to many other websites about aurora borealis.

The research on Northern Lights brought us to a discussion of homes and where people would live in the north.  We discussed homes and the special snow homes people can build in the area.  We then checked out websites on igloos and how to build one.  We discovered children at Elanora Heights Primary School in Sydney, Australia had created a website on building igloos. (www.schools.ash.org.au/elanorah/igloos/htm)  Another site we discovered was again created by students and teachers and it was about building an igloo with sugar cubes.  It was decided to try building some ourselves.

We also came across a website that demonstrated how to build a real igloo entitled "Igloo Builders Guide" (home.no.net/gedra/igloo_bg.htm)  We went out one day and attempted to use their methods to build an igloo.  Unfortunately, the snow was not the right kind of snow to build a real igloo, so we moved inside and built an almost life size igloo from mandarin orange boxes covered in white paper.  The boxes became our blocks of snow.  Building the igloo was great fun.  The igloo replaced our "House Centre" for the month of January.  The children enjoyed going into the igloo and sitting in a round circle and sharing stories.

The children enjoyed working on this project and were excited when they got to go on the computers in the lab. The almost life size igloo was another highlight for them.  Watching the children get excited about research and learning new things was the highlight for me.