New materials teach about Arctic animals, not cows and chickens

Nunavut's wildlife now comes in a box.

Or more specifically, the Nunavut Wildlife Theme Box. It's a project of the Department of Education, born out of the scarcity of classroom resources appropriate for life in Nunavut, said Leslie Leafloor, the department's manager of early childhood development.

After all, what good are classroom materials about the zoo or the May flowers brought by April showers?

"I wanted students to have resources here that are in their everyday life," Leafloor said.

No companies produce educational resources tailor-made for the northern classroom, so the education department made its own.

The prototype sitting in a boardroom in the department's Iqaluit office is essentially a banker's box, painted to look like a wooden crate, with the words "Wildlife of Nunavut" stamped on the side. Eventually, 250 of the boxes will be shipped to schools, daycares, libraries and hamlet offices across the territory.

The box is packed with puzzles, flash cards, posters and life-size footprints of 24 Arctic species of the land, sea and air – not to mention two life-size puppets, one of a raven and one of a snowy owl.

"Kids are learning about their environment, things they're going to see," said Gillian Corless, coordinator of Nunavut's Promise to Children and Youth program.

Leafloor said the materials in the boxes are meant to be versatile: older kids could use the cards in a game of go fish, or the puppets could go along with an elder's storytelling. And nearly everything in the boxes is quadrilingual, which is especially important for teaching language skills to students, Leafloor said.

"If you don't have the resources to back (language curriculum) up they're not going to have those strong skills," she said.

The theme boxes were designed with the help of Nunavut Tourism, the Department of the Environment, and early childhood educators Geela Tagak and Catherine Lefebvre.

Leafloor and Corless hope the boxes will arrive in schools by the end of April.