David's Diary: Saturday, November 17, 2001

School At Port Napoleon

Today Kevin and I are spending the entire day working on a Science project. Most subjects are broken up into blocks (a block takes a term) and each block is broken up into papers (a typical Science block will have five or six papers with five assignments each). The last paper of Kevin's Science block is a special project that will be the equivalent of five assignments, but completed in a single day instead of over a couple of weeks.

Our goal is to find a creepy crawly creature to study. We start early in the morning touring Port Napoleon, the boat yard where we are staying, looking for interesting creatures. We turn over rocks, look under trees, and search the shoreline. In Vancouver, we would have found fifty creepy crawlies by lunch time, but for Kevin and I, we had not found a single specimen.

Port Napoleon

Learning this year is not restricted to formal books. As we explore the boat yard looking for creepy crawlies, we also discuss the various boats we see. Why are some keels short and others long? Why are there usually one, but sometimes two? What do you call a sailboat with two hulls instead of one? These, and many other questions, form part of our day as Kevin absorbs information on many levels.

In the end, we did find our creepy crawly creature. A mosquito rose out of the grass just as were about to give up. Port St. Louis is so famous for its mosquitoes, that at sunset we all do the Port St. Louis dance. As thousands of mosquitoes rise from the stagnant water that surrounds the area, you dance as you kill them until bug repellent can be sprayed on every visible surface of skin.

Kevin spent the afternoon writing up his mosquito and inventing experiments to see how it reacts to its environment. It is dark before we find time to release our mosquito back where we found it, but for Kevin his first term of Science is finally over.