Quinte Mohawk School

Last Friday I went to the Quinte Mohawk school with classmates of mine and classmates from section A. It was a great all around experience. I arrived at the school a little bit later then most of the students because I went the wrong way. When I arrived at the school Everyone was in the gym. After meeting up in the gym Sarah discussed with all of us how the day would look. From there we broke up into two groups the one group was in the gym doing the dance with the kids, while the other group that I was in got a tour of the school. It didn't take that long to notice all the diffrent paintings, picutres, drawings etc) throughout the school. You could tell that The Arts are  a big part of the Aborginal peoples  Culture.

After we had the tour we came back to the gym and joined the children in the dance they were doing. I was a little hesitant on picking a partner to dance with. It was strange because I felt unsure of what to do. All the girls found a child or two that they partnered up with but the guys including myself were looking at each other with a confused kind of look. We evntually found someone to partner up with. I was with Chris we both didn't know how to dance to the music because it was a diffrent style and something we were not use to. We started to pick up on the dance when we were sitting down while the women were up. We wacthed some of the Native women and children dance to the music, Alot of the movement seemed to be footwork and a little bit of movement from the upper body.

The final dance that we did was the duck dance, That dance turned out to be something I was not expecting. I tried doing some of the moves I saw some of the studnets and women doing.Iit felt kind of funny because this was all new to me but i enjoyed it.

After that we went outside with the kids. I played soccer with about ten other CYW's against 20+ kids. It was fun even thought they outnumbered us. It was great to see everyone getting engaged with the kids some just did something simple like throwing a football, playing basketball, doing hop scotch, Skipping, but eveyone was doing something active with the kids.

When recess was over we came back into the school and we all split up into diffrent classrooms. I went in a class with John, Sarah, and Anjanette. It was a grade two classroom. We helped the kids with crafts When I found that out I became a little nervours because I am not that talented when it comes to arts and crafts. But I did my best to help the children with there bracelets. Some of the children that I was working with were telling me storied about there pets, familes and things they like to do. It was amazing to see how welceoming they were and also how talented they were with those crafts. I remember Sarah coming into the class and taking picutres but she could only take pictures of us I didn't understand why that was I thought maybe it was because they didn't want the kids to be exposed to any pictures or anything along those lines.

I wanted to stay in that class for the whole day the kids were so sweet. They all thanked us for helping them and a bunch of them came over and gave us hugs. That was a bit of a surprise to all of us but it showed that there were grateful and happy that we came in and spent some time with them.

This was a great experience and I think this should be an on going thing for future students. I was unsure of where to go for my out of my comfort zone project. I now know that I want to go to some kind of reserve or some type of aborginal setting. After expereinceing and learning the things i did that day I was motivated to learn more.