Winter Games - Winter Olympic

With several months of snow and cold every winter, you can either attempt to ignore it and hope it goes away or you can embrace it. Jacquie Tarnowski was of the view that we should, "... celebrate winter and have the WHOLE school involved from JK to Grade 8. The Winter Games started as 2 days in which the teachers ran each station. The student body was divided into teams with the grade 8s as captains. The teams completed a circuit that took up the school yard and part of the track. As the enrolment decreased so did the number of events so everything was held in the schoolyard. Eventually the grade eight students were running the events."

The first Winter Games at A B Ellis coincided with the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary and it was staged as our Winter Olympics. It kicked off with Art Vondette, one of our bus drivers, lighting a cauldron on the front steps. He had been a torch bearer at one of the actual Olympic Games The games were held on the morning of March 6 and the afternoon of March 7.

Below is a collection of images of a school procession in winter. People think that this is a school version of an Olympic Games Procession. No one I have asked can actually remember what it is but the fact that it took place on a cold day in winter would suggest that this must be what is going on. I am still puzzled by the fact that some of the signs refer to nursery rhymes.

The children participated in 23 different events including:

- Jug curling
- Tug of war
- Snowball throw (to hit a target - not each other)
- Ski jump(team members jumped over a ski to see which team achieved the greatest distance)
- Various snow related relays
- Snowshoe race
- Toboggan race
- Boardwalk race (planks with rope straps into which each person slipped their feet - whole team moving together on 2 planks)

I believe that these images were taken at the Winter Games in 2001

Tug-of-War