Wednesday, February 15, 2012

The Jugloo!

Sioux Trail was home to a giant jugloo!  A jugloo is an igloo shaped building made out of empty one gallon milk (or water) jugs. The jugloo was built as a collaborative effort between students, staff and volunteers.  The project started in November with our student council and the collection of empty milk jugs. The goal was to collect 1500 empty jugs and in the end we had over 2200 containers.


Over the weekend of February 11 construction of the giant julgoo began and was mostly complete by Saturday night. Unfortunately, the roof dropped on Saturday night and then the entire roof collapsed on Sunday night.  On Monday some of the walls started falling in.  With the help of several fifth and sixth graders the entire giant jugloo was disassembled by Monday evening.   The giant jugloo was over 25 feet across at the base, took over 41 man hours to build, and used over 1600 plastic jugs. It also took 4 pizzas, 18 cans of Mountain Dew and I bottle of water. 
  
On Tuesday morning Sioux Trail staff and student were greeted by a new medium sized jugloo.  This one is set up on the stage and will be up as a reading station during I Love to Read month (February).This jugloo is featured in the brief video with the choreographed lights and holiday music.  The lights and music were set up for effect, but do not remain in the jugloo when students are reading in it.

Martha Glende is responsible for the idea and Mark Glende gets credit for a large portion of the engineering and construction.  If you like this wonderful creation please send thanks their way!

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Happy Reading Happy Feet

Yikes!  I looked at the Panther Pages blog and saw two scary things!
1. The last post was in November
2. It was about lice!

I need to get caught up and the blog post needs to be about positive things that are happening at Sioux Trail (please no more blog posts about lice!).

Instead of writing about lice I've chosen to write about the invasion of penguins into our main hallway.  With the help of may staff and students the main hallway has been transformed into a winter wonderland for I Love to Read Month (February).  There are snowbanks to read on, a pond to ice fish from (the fish have jokes on them) and a jugloo (an igloo made out of all those one gallon milk jugs that you sent in) to curl up in and read.

When you find snowbanks and igloos you sometimes find penguins and this is true at Sioux Trail.  On random mornings a small group of penguins can be found dancing around on the snowbanks.  Mr. Popper has even come in to visit with the students and his penguins.

The next big happening in the rumored construction of another milk jug creation.  Stay tuned for more information that will be coming soon!