THE ICEFJORD CENTRE

PAGE BY PAGE  GUIDE – THE BOOK CREATOR BOOK “LIFE AS A HUNTER”

The students meet the Icefjord Centre in two pictures, showing summer and winter respectively.

In class you can talk about:

• What the Icefjord Centre is.
• What the surroundings around the Centre look like.
• The difference between summer and winter.
• How summer and winter differ where you live.

Talk about the map and about how many people live in Ilulissat. And about how many people live in the town or the settlement where you live.

The students see part of a world map.

The task now is to move the red marker down into the map in order to show where each student lives.

The marker is found in the white box and can be drawn into the map.

In class you can talk about:

• Differences and similarities between Ilulissat and your own town or settlement.

Now it is time for the students to listen to the podcast Life as a Hunter. They find the podcast by clicking on the picture on page 12.

Before listening to the podcast, you can give a short introduction to the contents of the podcast.

Be aware that Mikkel tells his story in Greenlandic. The story is then retold in English.

The contents of the podcast

Mikkel tells:

• that he was born in 1940 and grew up in a hunting and fishing family in Ilulissat.
• that since he was 12 years old, he has worked as a fisherman and therefore he has a special connection to the Icefjord.
• that his father was both hunter and fisherman and that there was no doubt that Mikkel also would be a hunter or fisherman or both. These were his only options.
• that the dogs, who in those days moved around freely, were the most important. From the age of 10, he looked after the family’s dogs in the summer.
• about being close to his father and about how his father taught him that life as a fisherman on the Icefjord can be dangerous. His father also taught him how to fish by hand, remove the entrails and cut out the fish.
• about the ice that in all kinds of weather slowly moves out towards the sea. At full moon, when the current is stronger, the ice moves faster.
• about how the fishermen used to estimate how far the ice on the Icefjord moved per day. This is called the “movement” of the ice.
• about the importance of keeping an eye on the “movement”, so they could remove their equipment (hunting and fishing gear) in time, before the current took it.
• about the Ilulissat fjord (the Icefjord) having a deep place in his heart.

It is recommended that the students listen in pairs or small groups.

Let the students spend a few minutes discussing what they have heard in the podcast.

On page 13 the students are to make small sound recordings where they tell about the podcast. The pictures on the page will help them remember what they have heard.

Sound recording, see instruction 1 here.

The recording will now be represented by a small sound icon. This icon can be placed wherever you wish on the page. You can listen to the recording over and over again.

Review in class

We recommend that you have a joint discussion in class when the work with pages 12-13 is finished.

While doing this, it would be a good idea to support the discussion by writing concepts and keywords on the board.

In class you could talk about:

• What surprised the students while listening to the podcast.
• Concepts and keywords that the students encountered in the podcast.

In the text below you can find inspiration for the class discussion.

In the book creator book you can add more pages for other topics, concepts and keywords that you discuss.

 Concepts and keywords

• Hunting family/fishing family – the podcast is about Mikkel who is from a fishing family. In those days you did not dream of anything else than what you were born to do and you were quite satisfied with that.

Would you be satisfied if you were told to have the same job as your parents have?

• High level education – when you have finished the general education in primary school, you can choose between a number of high level educations. It could be a short, a medium long or long higher education. This is where you specialize in the field you would like to work with in your adult life.

Which education do you know about?

Which education interests you?

• Glacier – the word glacier means ”a river of ice”. A glacier is a large mass of slowly moving ice. When the weight of new snow becomes sufficiently heavy on the inland ice, the lowest section of ice is pressed out towards the coast. The stream of ice that is caused by this, you call a glacier.

How is life by the Icefjord influenced by the glacier?

• Movement and calving – when blocks of ice break off the glacier front and fall into the sea because of gravitation, it is called calving. You could say that the glacier is “giving birth” to icebergs and ice floes. The great calvings, where large parts of the glacier front are loosened, only happen during the summer, but smaller bits of ice break off the edge all of the time and can be seen the whole year round.

When the glacier calves and pushes the inland ice out into the Icefjord, Mikkel and the other fishermen call it the movement. They estimated the movement by placing a marker one day and coming back the next day to measure how many steps the glacier had moved. This is the way they estimate how far the glacier has moved in e.g. a day.

Why was it important to keep an eye on the movement?

• The inland ice – an ice sheet that covers a large area with ice.

The ice sheet in Greenland is the next largest in the world, the ice sheet on Antarctica is the largest. An ice sheet is a glacier that is over 50.000 km².

What would the rest of the Earth look like if all of the inland ice melted?

What happens to the water level when the inland ice melts?

• Full moon – is one of the phases of the Moon. The Moon has four phases: full moon, new moon, first quarter and last quarter. The phase is determined by how big an area of the Moon is illuminated by the Sun. Full moon is when all of the Moon is illuminated by the Sun.

Have you observed all four phases of the Moon?

When do you think the Moon is most beautiful and why?

The students are now to research educational options in Greenland today and compare them to Mikkel’s story about educational options in the 1940s. They answer the questions in the black speech balloons by recording their answers.

They can search for knowledge in the podcast and listen to Mikkel’s story once again. They can also search for knowledge on these websites Norden.dk and stat.gl

You can review in class and assess pros and cons of growing up in Greenland in the 1940s compared to today.

Sound recording, see instruction 1 here.

On pages 16 and 17 the students can describe the keywords and concepts that you have gone through. They can write them, record them as an audio file or make a drawing and insert the picture. Let the students elaborate on keywords and concepts that you have gone through together.

Sound recording, see instruction 1 here.

Insertion of pictures, see instruction 2 here.

The students are now to find out which high level education they themselves think could be interesting. If the students cannot find an appropriate Educational Guide, we recommend you to assist them. They are to investigate which high level education they find interesting. They are to answer the questions in the four boxes on page 19 after having researched on high level education.

Here are some suggestions to further questions you could ask the students about their research:

• Why do you think this exact high level education sounds interesting?
• Are there other educations that sound equally interesting?
• In what kind of a study environment do you think you would feel best (reading a lot, physical work or other things)?
• Who can help you obtain what you would like to do?

As a completion of the task, the students now make an audio story/podcast in the form of an interview about life in a hunting/fishing family. Two by two the students plan an interview and interview each other.
The audio file is recorded directly in the book.

As an illustration to accompany the audio story, the students create a picture.

They can find inspiration in the podcast graphics on page 16. To create the picture the students can make use of photos, drawings, linoleum print or collage. The illustration is inserted on page 25.

Sound recording and insertion of pictures, see instruction 1 and 3 here.

The students discuss their research in class. It is important to emphasise that this is not about assessing each other’s choices and fields of interest, but on the contrary to help each other find out which possibilities there are. It is therefore important to support the students in listening to the other students’ research so that they can ask clarifying questions and research together. 

If you intend to work with some of the other podcasts from the Icefjord Centre, it might make sense to save the students’ Book Creator book so that the work, they have done with it, can be used again.

The podcast Life as a Hunter has been created by the Icefjord Centre in Ilulissat.The teaching material for the podcast Life as a Hunter has been developed by Lotte Brinkmann and Daniella Maria Manuel, Anholt Læringsværksted with feedback from Leg med IT.

The student’s book in Book Creator has been developed as part of the project Nutaaliorta from Kivitsisa.The template was designed by Rikke Falkenberg Kofoed and Daniella Maria Manuel, Leg med IT.

The teaching material Life as a Hunter is published under a Creative Commons crediting licence CC:BY.

The texts, assignments and pictures can be shared, reproduced and adapted, with the proviso that “Life as a Hunter by The Icefjord Centre Ilulissat” is credited as the source.