And the Winner is... Antarctica Writing Contest Winners

Today we had an awards ceremony
for the winners in our first ever SVDP-ALC writing contest. The topic was "life in a tent in Antarctica" based the real life re-enactment by John Miller of the USAP of the events of the famous Antarctic expeditions of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. John Miller stayed overnight outside at the South Pole, Antarctica in an exact replica of the famous tent (see the photo of the replica John Miller sent). Our students were asked to write about what it would be like to stay in the tent at Antarctica. Student Aaron Hawthorne wrote a nice essay about this and won an award for his excellent participation. Well done, Aaron! (See his photo standing next to our SVDP-ALC volunteer teacher, Dr. Kathleen Dunlap -- known as Kathy at our school.) Three other students who were not present today also will receive certificates for participating. Also, our blog's first guest writer, librarian and teacher Patti Muggivan, will receive a certificate for participating. (Patti wrote an essay but could not technically compete since she is not a student. However, we will post her essay on the blog soon, and the students will read it and learn from it as a literacy tool in our small group classes.) We will be posting some of the student essays on this blog too.

The winner for "best essay writer" went to Jennie Gorden. (See her photo with Sr. Kathleen Bahlinger.) Well done, Jennie!

John Miller plans to send a special award for the winner, and we will tell you more about this in a later post. We will also post some of John's comments and photos about his "tent experiment" soon too. Much more on this story later, stay tuned.

--Adrian