Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Serving the Hub of the North since 1960
Volume 55 • Issue 11
FREE
Campaign helps raise money for school breakfast programs BY IAN GRAHAM EDITOR@THOMPSONCITIZEN.NET
TOM COCHRANE PLAYING AT NICKEL DAYSARTS & ENTERTAINMENT PAGE 9
THOMPSON RESIDENT VOLUNTEERING AT PAN AM GAMESNEWS - PAGE 16
Wal-Mart’s Thompson store manager Kris Burky helped make sure Wapanohk Community School students ate the most important meal of the day when he stopped by to man the cereal station for the school’s breakfast program March 11. Burky’s participation was part of a three-week national campaign by Wal-Mart to solicit donations for the Breakfast Club of Canada, which funds breakfast programs at 1,328 schools, including Wapanohk, that collectively feed 152,000 children. Wal-Mart’s national goal was to raise $3 million, while the local store was
shooting to raise $4,600 by selling $1 bookmarks at the till. The Wal-Mart campaign, which began Feb. 19 and wrapped up March 13, is the Breakfast Club of Canada’s biggest fundraiser of the year. WalMart will also match donations made via www. helpthemshine.ca to a maximum of $790,000. Johanna Petrowski from Wapanohk says the school’s breakfast program has been running for over 10 years now and has been funded by the Breakfast Club of Canada for the past few years. School staff and volunteers also help serve breakfast to students every morning that school is in session, with fire-
Thompson Citizen photo by Ian Graham Thompson Wal-Mart store manager Kris Burky and Stephanie Trueman serve breakfast to students at Wapanohk Community School on March 11. fighter-paramedics pitching in every Friday. “We feed an average of
50 to 80 kids per day,” says Petrowski, noting that some of the food
they serve is prepared by Wapanohk’s after-school cooking club.
Grade 7 students go extreme sledding MOLLY@THOMPSONCITIZEN.NET
Grade 7 students in Thompson are building and riding sleds as part of their science curriculum. Alyssa Harman, northern in-school program officer with Skills Canada Manitoba, is travelling to the different schools and teaching the kids about the trades industry. “It’s to promote the skill trades and the specific sections would be design research, aerodynamics, team worker, problem solving, leadership.” The students are put into groups of four, and each group has to design and build a sled that will hold the weight of two of their teammates. “They are given one sheet of 4x8 cardboard, two six-foot 2x4s, one 20foot length of rope, contact cement, duct tape, and a stapler and they have to build a
Thompson Citizen photo by Molly Gibson Kirby The Vines team pulls their partners to the finish line of the race, during extreme sledding at Westwood School on March 11. sled that will pull two of their teammates through a track outside in the snow.” On March 11, Harman was at Westwood School. Wendy Mercer, the Grade 7 teacher, says it fits in with their current science unit. “In the Grade 7 science curriculum one of the units is structure
and forces, so it actually ties in perfectly. How they’re assessed for their provincial report cards, they’re assessed in three ways. Knowledge and understanding, inquiry, and design process. So it’s pretty full circle.” By 2020 Canada is going to be short a million trades
workers, Harman says. “We’re trying to start young, there’s a huge push from the government to attract our youth to the future of the trades.” Each team builds their sleds in the morning with no help from any adults or teachers, and races take
place in the afternoon. Ashley Morgan, one of the students at Westwood School, said she enjoyed the lesson. “It was boring at first, but after awhile I got used to it and it was really fun. I hope to work with all my friends and I had a good experience doing this because most classes are just in a classroom.” Sleds were judged on creativity, originality of team name, and structure. Two teams raced outside at a time, on a track Harman put together, with the fastest sled at each school winning a small prize. Mercer says she noticed hands-on activities like this help students learn better. “We’ve been trying with science to add more materials so they can do more hands on. They like that, and when they’re doing something, the process and the visual process they remember. So any-
time they do hands-on they retain information better.” Harman agreed, saying it teaches them school information, along with the students learning what a job in the trade industry would be like. “They get to participate in the design, writing, all of the essential skills which are important, so they’re discovering if they like working with their hands or like the design piece, and it shows maybe at the grassroots level, maybe trades are the thing to do.” After the race at Westwood, one student said they would have changed things around, by placing the wood runners differently, and having a cardboard windshield so the snow didn’t get in their faces. Harman joined Deerwood School on March 13, Riverside school will build sleds on March 20, and Wapanohk will be the last to go extreme sledding on March 27.
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