THE ICEFJORD CENTRE

PAGE BY PAGE GUIDE – THE BOOK CREATOR BOOK “THE TREASURES OF A GREENLANIC FREEZER”

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. Also talk about how many people live in the town or 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.

The students are to explore the Greenlandic food culture.

On page 12 they first read the text that describes the tasks. Then they click on the PDF file and read about the Greenlandic food culture.

On pages 13-15 the students are to describe a dish that they think best characterises their own food culture. They can find recipes on the internet if they do not know them by heart.

On the pages there are boxes where the students can write about their own dish. They can find help in the few words written in the boxes:

• The name of the dish – here they write the name of the dish.
• Story behind the dish – if there exists a story about the dish they write it here. It can be a well known story or just a story from their own home about the dish.
• Reason for choice of dish – here they write why they think that this particular dish is characteristic for the food culture they have grown up in.
• Ingredients & recipe – are to be written in a way that makes it easy for others to cook this dish.
• A picture of the dish – it can be a picture they find on the internet or if it is possible while you work with the podcast, the students could cook the dish at home and take a picture of it.

The task is to be solved either singly or in small groups. When everyone is finished with the task, you mix the students and they present their dishes to each other.

Suggestion to further work with the task:

• if the students fancy, they can try cooking each others’ dishes

Insertion of picture and text: see instruction 2 and 3 here.

Now it is time for the students to listen to the podcast The Treasures of a Greenlandic Freezer. They find the podcast by clicking on the picture on page 16.

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

”The rich wildlife and sealife of Ilulissat is the reason why all families have not just one, but many deep freezers” says Katrine.

Malik’s, Elin’s og Vera’s narratives.

The thing collect most in Ilulissat are freezers. Two – three freezers per household is the standard. One for meat, one for fish and fowl and a small one for berries, mushrooms and herbs.

About 75% of what people eat, they gather and hunt themselves. This is why many Greenlanders have their own boat.

In one freezer they have for example:

• reindeer meat, meat from musk oxen, eider, grouse and dried reindeer meat.

In another freezer they may have:

• whale meat, seal meat, trout, codfish, halibut, dried capelan, dried whale, dried salmon, halibut, lumpfish roe, mussels, whale skin

In a smaller freezer they have:

• crowberries, blueberries, juniper, angelica, Greenlandic thyme, Rhododendron Groenlandicum and mushrooms

They prepare some of the catch before storing it in the freezer. Whale meat, halibut and trout are smoked, reindeer and capelan are dried and mussels boiled.

The herbs are used for tea, for baking and for cooking.

There is no food waste. When new food is put into the freezer, the oldest food is placed at the top of the freezer and is eaten first. If some of it has become too old, it is given to the dogs.

Because they have lived so close to nature for thousands of years, they also get to know the “taste of the landscape”. Elin and Vera can easily taste where in the Disko Bay an animal comes from. Elin says that the taste of reindeer and seal meat changes the further south you get.

At weekends many people sail out to fish and hunt. When the men go out hunting seals, the women are put ashore to gather herbs and berries.

We recommend that the students listen to the podcast in pairs or in small groups.

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

On page 17 the students are to record small audio files 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 16-17 is finished.

It would be a good idea that you, during the discussion, write keywords and concepts on the board.

In class you could talk about:

• How many freezers do you have at home?
• Have you tried eating food that you have caught yourself?

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

In connection with some of the concepts there are tasks in the Book Creator book.

You might insert more pages for other topics, concepts and keywords.

Concepts and keywords.

• Deep freezer – there are different types of freezers: a freezer combined with the refrigerator, a chest freezer or an upright freezer. Often a chest freezer can hold more than the two other kinds, but it can be more difficult to get an overview over the contents.

What kind of freezer do you have at home?

Why is it a good idea to have a freezer?

• Food store – is food that you have collected and saved for later use. For example you can save your stores in a larder or a deep freezer.

Do you have a food stores at home?

Is there some food that cannot be preserved for a longer period of time?

• Disko Bay – is the largest bay in Greenland. Among other things you find Ilulissat at the bay, which is where the podcast takes place. Today it is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Greenland. It is an unbelievably beautiful area with the enormous floating icebergs, the rich wildlife and especially the many whales. This is also where you can experience the hunter life of the small settlements.

Even though hunting and fishing still are the main livelihood in the Disko Bay, the service professions are growing with the expanding tourism.

Why do you think it is called Disko Bay?

Here are some concepts that do not derive from the podcast, but are relevant in connection with solving the tasks.

• Food culture – is about the way a society construes food. Like which dishes are eaten, when the largest meal is served during the day or which ingredients are used the most. A country can have traditional dishes that you do not eat very often in other countries.

Are you familiar with food cultures from other countries?

• Food waste – is food that could have been eaten by man, but for some reason or other has been thrown away.

In Greenland there are very many dogs. Sled dogs in North Greenland and sheep dogs in South Greenland. If some food has become too old, the dogs get it. In this way you avoid food waste.

Why is it important to avoid food waste?

• Food web – shows the feeding relationship between different organisms in an ecosystem. It differs from a food chain that focuses on a certain type of food for a certain organism. Whereas a food web shows the relationship between a number of organisms at the same time.

What happens if you remove an organism from a food web?

On these pages the students make short descriptions of the keywords and concepts that you have gone through and worked with until now. They can write them, record them as an audio file or make a drawing and insert the picture. Their products will be part of the further work with the podcast. Give the students an opportunity to work on their reference book and add new knowledge as they go along with the next pages in the book.

Sound recording and insertion of pictures: see instruction 1 and 2 here.

The students imagine that they are going to invite Elin and Vera for dinner and they must make use of the food they have in their freezer. They could go back and listen to the podcast again to find out what kinds of food are mentioned.

On pages 20-21 there is a picture of “their freezer” filled with bags. On the bags there is a tag that tells what each bag contains.

On page 20 there is also a link to these homepages from greenland-travel.dk, where the students can find inspiration.

The students now are to compose a dinner and write an invitation to Elin and Vera. They write it on pages 22-23.

Requirements for the invitation:

• The guests must feel welcome.
• The names of the dishes must be mentioned and what ingredients they consist of.
• Place and time for the dinner must be mentioned

Insertion of text: see instruction 3 here.

The students construct a food web that contains some of the animals and plants mentioned in the podcast.

On pages 24-25 there are 7 pictures of animals and plants: angelica, milk-cap, blueberries, arctic thyme, ptarmigan, reindeer and musk ox. The students move the pictures around and use the pencil tool to make arrows, so that you can see who lives off what.

When they have constructed their food web, you can have a class discussion about the three herbivores: the musk ox, the ptarmigan and the reindeer. Also talk about whether or not there are any carnivores and what the difference is between the two types of animals.

Next the students find a picture of a Greenlandic animal that is carnivorous unlike the three herbivores on the pages. The picture is inserted in the empty frame. Now this picture is to become part of the food web together with the rest of the pictures.

On page 25 there are 7 pictures of various edible items. Let the students search for information about all of them to find out what kind of food they prefer. If your school has access to a relevant online encyclopedia, use that one or else surf on the internet. In the empty box they may insert another edible item they especially like.

Suggestion to further work with this task:

• You could talk about photosynthesis and how all food webs or food chains need a phototrophic organism that can perform photosynthesis.

Insertion of picture and drawing using the pencil tool: see instruction 2 and 4 here.

The students imagine that they have been hired to make a campaign that helps families reduce food waste.

Which form the campaign takes, the students decide themselves; it could be a song, a video, a poster or something quite different. The title of the campaign is: “Food Waste Campaign in (write their own country or town)”

On pages 26-27 there is information about food waste from the podcast and statistics from Denmark and the rest of the world.

On this homepage from stopwastingfoodmovement.org you can find more information about food waste.

On pages 28-29 the students insert their campaign. There are some boxes that can help the students. They are free to delete boxes they do not need or add more boxes. They can also add more pages if needed.

Let the students present their campaigns for the rest of the class or for one of the classes in a lower grade if possible.

Insertion of audio files, insertion of pictures, insertion of text and insertion of video: see instruction 1, 2, 3 and 5 here.

The students show their products to the class. 

Make sure that the framework for feedback is positive criticism. The students should be supported in assessing what is good – and what might be done better. Find more inspiration here.

Not specifically with a view to making new products, but foremost to let the students discover and work with this kind of constructive and positive criticism.

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 the work they have done with it can be used again.

If you wish to let the students make use of the feedback they have received from the class, you could reserve time for them to continue their work with their products. So that they can use the feedback they have received from each other and change things in their product.

The podcast The Treasures of a Greenlandic Freezer has been created by the Icefjord Centre in Ilulissat.

The teaching material for the podcast The Treasures of a Greenlandic Freezer 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 a part of the Nutaaliorta project from Kivitsisa. The template has been developed by Rikke Falkenberg Kofoed and Daniella Maria Manuel from Leg med IT.

The teaching material The Treasures of a Greenlandic Freezer 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 “The Treasures of a Greenlandic Freezer by The Icefjord Centre Ilulissat” is credited as the source.