Education takes many forms

Remember the story of moving the library? Well, there were other "educational" pursuits we carried out at John A Silver School that weren't technically approved by the Saskatchewan Board of Education. We learned a lot of things that were probably more useful through them however!

In 1971, the province of Saskatchewan threw a series of celebrations related to the signing of treaties that allowed European settlement of the grassland prairie eventually leading to the induction of the province into Confederation in 1905. Alsask was no exception to the celebratory mood. The radar station got into the act by incorporating Homecoming '71 into the annual winter carnival and by providing a lot of resources for the Homecoming Parade in the early summer.

One feature of the winter carnival was a snow sculpture competition. Individual families built them on their front yards and the four teams that the messes divvied into also created team sculptures in a central spot. In 1971, the students of John A Silver got involved too. We had the guys from Motor Support Equipment pile a bunch of snow on the playground closest to the kindergarten room, where we built a tipi and an aboriginal man sitting cross-legged in front of it smoking a pipe. We painted our sculpture with tempera paints from our art supplies and learned about the native Saskatchewan people while we worked. Well, didn't our sculpture win a special prize!!

We had SO much fun with the sculpture that we begged to be allowed to have a float in the parade. Mr Proud was a tough man to convince but in the end he relented. I'm sure we used an entire year's worth of industrial toilet paper to make the flowers we put on our float. There was a bit of a dilemma when it came to the fact that all our flowers were sort of a dingy not-quite- white, until someone suggested spray paint. We ended up with red, green and white toilet paper flowers that we stapled onto a sheet of plywood to spell out "Homecoming 1971" that was then turned into a billboard. Mr Winter, being a farm boy, provided a flatbed hay wagon and a tractor to tow the float in the parade. (There had been a devastating fire on the Winter farm the previous autumn; their home was lost but all their farm equipment was spared.) We pulled together some "period" costumes and the people riding on the float represented the early settlers of the province. (I didn't know then that my great-grandparents Mabel Shaw Cubitt and WJ Cubitt, and her father Albert Shaw had been among them!) The parade was a roaring success and we had a ton of fun building our contribution. We learned something about Saskatchewan history, but more importantly we learned teamwork and mutual respect. Who says education has to come from board-sanctioned textbooks?