Unalakleet: Training, Beach, and Bones

Today I began my New Teacher Orientation with the Bering Strait School District!  It is great being here with all these new teachers from all over the district.  I have met the teachers I saw a the BSSD booth while I was signing my contract.  There are a lot of new teachers from Oregon, especially from the Portland area. I arrived last night in a Cessna that was chartered for us through Era Alaska.  It sat six people including the pilot.  It was a great flight!

St. Michael from the air.  The village is sticks out into the Norton Sound and is surrounded by swamps and marshes.  As we flew over I realized that St. Michael is also an island, there is a canal that cuts us off from the mainland.

Nothing in St. Michael is paved.  The roads are gravel or dirt (where the gravel has been pushed to the edges or into the ditches.  This includes the road to the airport, the lot where you park to wait for your plane, the tarmac, and the runway.  It is all gravel.  I didn't notice it when we flew in on Friday, but yesterday, flying out of St. Michael in a little Cessna, I realized that it was all gravel.  That made the experience even more exciting!  

We landed in Unalakleet just in time for dinner.  We took our luggage (suitcase, sleeping bag, pillow) down the hall into one of the high school classrooms.  Along the way we grabbed air mattresses that were provided by the district.  We settled into a classroom and then headed to the cafeteria for dinner and teacher time.  After dinner I went for a walk around Unalakleet with Carrol (new teacher in Savoonga).  He pointed out some native plants and we had a great time just talking about teaching and our past experiences.  We got back to the school about 10pm and I decided it was time to get ready for bed.  Some other teachers had gone out to the beach, stayed in a played Phase 10, or played Texas Hold 'Em at the principals house.  My classroom-mates and I got settled for bed around 10:30pm but we stayed up talking and telling stories until after midnight.  After that I had a hard time falling to sleep, and it wasn't because it was still light outside (one of the blackout curtains was broken), it was because the hall lights were on.  I don't know if we can turn them off.  We'll see tonight.  

Today we began our trainings.  I went to a training with two other ECE (Early Childhood Education) teachers and one kindergarten teacher led by Julie the ECE coordinator.  We worked on the assessments that we will be giving our four-year olds in September and again in April.  After lunch we had a chance to look over the Curiosity Corner curriculum (Pre-school curriculum of Success for All).  Tomorrow we will get a chance to look more closely at the curriculum.  

Tonight after dinner I headed out for a longer walk on the beach heading toward the airport (air strip).  There are many unusual things you can find on an Alaskan beach.  From antique glass bottles (St. Michael--I plan to look) to fossilized bones and silver dollars.  Today I found the following items.  

***Caution:  Some pictures contain beached sea-life in varying stages of breaking down***

The shells are amazing.  The majority of the shells I saw were whole shells, most of those had both halves of the shell.

Leg bone compared to my foot.

Another large bone just a little large than my foot.

Pile of miscellaneous bones.

BIG Bone

Headless Flounder

BIG Salmon.  On the Oregon Coast you watch out for washed up Jellyfish.  On the Alaska Coast you watch out for washed up salmon.  They cover the beach.  You constantly have to watch your step and sometimes you have to move up the beach to avoid large groups of fish.

Small Salmon

Large piece of backbone...including part of the base of the spine.

More bits of spine.

More Animals:

Whale--3 feet long

Seal....ick

Walrus...

 ALRIGHT!!! The worst is over.  The rest of my animal pictures will be ALIVE.