This week’s theme:
Adventures to… Lapland
This week’s colouring in sheet:
Download and print this week’s colouring sheet here.
Fact of the week: Lapland is in the North of Finland. It is known for its vast subarctic wilderness, ski resorts and natural phenomena including the midnight sun and the Northern Lights
Activities for the week…
Activity 1
Find Lapland on the map – Lapland is Finland’s northernmost region, it is an area where not many people live and is often covered in snow. It borders Sweden, Norway, Russia and the Baltic Sea. How would you travel there? What would you need for a trip to Lapland, which is in the Arctic circle? Practice walking in snow.
The national costume of Lapland is called gakti, which is primarily bright blue and red and worn with reindeer-skin boots, colourful shawls and hats. Find some blue and red items of clothing to wear as you do these activities.
Activity 2
Lapland is the homeland of the indigenous Sami people, (this homeland also extends into neighbouring countries, of Norway, Sweden and Russia). People living in Lapland often speak two languages, Finnish, and the native Northern Sami language. Signs are written in both, so that everybody can understand. People who speak 2 languages are known as ‘bilingual’ Try leaning to say some Sami words, such as numbers or days of the week. Or try the many ways that you can say hello and goodbye in Finnish. Try greeting everybody in your house Finnish. Warning, they’re quite tricky languages, and some of the words require you to roll your tongue (if you need tongue-rolling practice, singing and dancing along to ‘Reet Petite’ is always good fun!)
Activity 3
Imagine you live up there in the North of Finland in the subarctic woodland wilderness in temperatures below zero, surrounded by snow and ice. Wrap up warm, and listen to a song sung in Sami – come up with some gentle snowflake actions to dance along to the music with. Ice makes magnificent frozen shapes – swirling shapes, curling shapes, jagged shapes and spiky shapes. Draw spikes, swirls, curls and jagged edges in the air with your finger. Can you then draw these same shapes with your whole body, moving in a slow icy dance while listening to the Sami song.
Look at this snowflake poem – can you make it into a song, with a rhythm to beat out or with instruments to play, and with actions for each line?
Activity 4
As well as wrapping up warm, you could design yourself a cosy bobble hat. Try dabbing your watery paint with kitchen roll to create the texture of a knitted pattern. Try using white crayon/oil pastel, or rubbing a wax candle to make a wintery design, the paint won’t stick to those white areas and will make a nice resist painted pattern.
Activity 5
Make a Lapland forest snow scene like this – if you don’t have white paint to flick, or splash, or finger paint for snow, try a light dusting of icing sugar or flour when things are dry.
Activity 6
Because Lapland is so close to the Arctic circle, it experiences many natural phenomena including:
The midnight sun – in the summer the sun in Lapland sometimes never sets and for 73 days each year, the sun is visible round the clock without any darkness. You can even still see the sun at midnight. Act like a bright, cheerful ray of sunshine to be seen all day – how will you show it on your face and in your body – act out the rays stretching and shining all day. Come up with a cheerful sun dance, you could even use torches to cast light. You could dance to a cheerful sunny dance to songs such as this, or this, or this, or this (from 2:14). How many bright yellow items can you find to build a cheerful, bright, sunshiny sun display?
Polar nights (also known as ‘Kaamos’) is a mystical period between December and January when the sun does not rise at all, so it is night time for 24 hours a day – throw a sheet or blanket over your head and shoulders to create a dark polar night at any time of day.
Sun Dogs and Moon Dogs are phenomenons that happen when sun or moon lights reflects off the ice particles in the air. Make the shapes of sun and moon dogs in the air. Wonder at their beauty!
Lapland is one of the best places in the world to view the Northern Lights. The northern lights are a natural light show, and it looks so good in Lapland due to the special winds which ensure that cloud rarely forms and the skies are kept clear.
Using flashing or glowing torches, nightlights, room lights, mobile phones, fairy lights and swishing coloured fabrics, create your own lights show.
Imagine watching the Northern Lights whilst stood in the snow in Lapland. Act out with your arms in the air the swirls of colour filling the night sky – the wisps of green, the swish of blue, the flash of pinks, the swirls of purples, the bands of yellow, and the twinkle of stars. Sometimes the swirls in the sky look like the skirt of a dancer. Try dancing with some ‘skirtography’, either by wearing a skirt or tucking sheets/teatowels into your waistband to swish and swirl like the night sky colours.
With coloured chalk, cotton wool to smudge, and a cardboard mountain cut-out, create your own Northern Lights artwork.
Activity 7
Levi is a tourist resort in Finnish Lapland, it’s best known for its snow filled winter ski slopes.
Try some skiing postures – try bending from side to side on your skis, try the correct arm positions, (bring your dinner trays!), try tucking yourself up and sticking your bum out for the steep downhill slopes, make yourself flat and long when you take your massive jumps, make some ‘snow plough’ v shapes to stop. Use these positions, and try some general skiing actions out when dancing to the Ski Sunday theme tune.
Try perfecting your balance on your skis. Hold a tray (or book) out in front of you and try a slalom (weaving in a zig zag, bending from side to side, heading left then right). Place some balls (or balls of tin foil) on your tray – can you zig zag to the left and right without dropping your balls?
Activity 8
Some Lapland holiday resorts also offer ice swimming!! Brrrr!
Set the scene and act out the following steps, with actions and sound effects: Leave your warm house all snug near the fire. Put on your swimming costume. Open the door and step outside into the falling snow. Run like mad through deep snow to reach the ice pool as quick as you can. The whistling icy wind nips at your exposed skin. You get goose bumps over your arms and legs. Take a deep breath. Talk yourself into it. Rub to warm your cold skin up. Count yourself down, 3,2,1. Dive or Jump into the water. Hit the icy water with a splash. The cold takes your breath away. Take some swimming strokes, surrounded by ice and snow. Give us your best ‘brrrrrr!’ Jump out and wrap yourself in a towel. Run back inside and have a warm cup of tea.
Think how you felt on your ice swim. Make a poem to sum it up, using the letters of ICE SWIM to form your poem. For example:
I thought I’d dare myself,
Can’t feel my toes when I dive in,
Every part of me is cold and numb,
Etc.
You could also come up with a poem using your senses: On my ice swim I touched … (what texture was it), I saw … (was it a good sight), I felt … (how did you feel emotionally), I smelled … , I heard (were you scared of what you heard), I tasted (was it a good taste?) etc. For example:
On my ice swim I touched the icy water with the end of my big toe before I jumped it, it felt so so cold.
On my ice swim I heard my friends jump in first making a huge splash, hearing them shudder made me afraid of how cold it would be.
Etc.
Activity 9
Check out some traditional folk dancing from Lapland – what story do you think the dance is trying to tell? Can you do any of the actions, moves and steps?
Activity 10
Lapland has an very special Ice Hotel. Each year it is rebuilt out of snow and ice, and in spring it simply melts back into the Torne River. Lapland also has a Snow Castle (see the outside and inside of the castle) which is reconstructed every year in January, when it is coldest and stands until mid-April when it begins to melt.
Act out building a castle or hotel from ice blocks, and then imagine sleeping there! What would you do to keep warm – come up with an exercise routine to generate some warmth!
Activity 11
The Lapland coat of arms is quite incredible! Come up with a coat of arms for your own country, or for Purple Patch!
Activity 12
There are the same number of reindeer in Lapland as there are people.
Watch a video of reindeer running – try and look and move like a graceful reindeer bobbing in the snow with your tail showing. The imprints that a herd of reindeer leave in the snow when they change direction makes a beautiful pattern – try closing your eyes with a pencil in your hand and allow your hand to move and draw, changing direction like the running reindeer – do this for the duration of this music. Open your eyes to see the pattern you’ve created in the snow (your paper)!
The streets of the capital city of Lapland, Rovaniemi, when viewed from the sky are laid out to look like reindeer antlers! Can you spot it? Draw yourself some reindeer antlers to hold above your head, or print these out to colour in.
Only Sami People can herd reindeer and each reindeer herder has his own marking (like shepherds in the UK), which is engraved on the reindeer so they know who it belongs to. Design your own marking that you would like to put on your own herd of reindeer to show that they were yours to look after. Or, find a shape of something around the house that you like the look of that could be your reindeer marking
Activity 13
Lapland is the land of the berries! Because there can be days of complete darkness during the winter months, berries tend to flourish in Lapland. There are your classic berries; blueberries, raspberries and cranberries, as well as some unusual berries, such as lingonberries, cloudberries and crowberries. Luckily, in Lapland you are allowed to pick and eat any berries you find!
Use your imagination and draw what you think lingonberries, cloudberries and crowberries look like from their names alone. What shape, size and colour are they? When you’ve finished, check your drawings against what they look like in real life: Cloudberry, Lingonberry and Crowberries.
Make up your own name for an unusual berry then act out finding, picking and eating your berry…does it grow high up or low down… is it rare or are there loads to pick… what will you collect them in… does it have thorns.. how big is it.. how would you pick them (would you use a huge comb like this Crowberry farmer) … is it really juicy/sour/sweet?
Why not take a photo of any of the activities you’ve tried this week and share it with us? You can share it on our Facebook, Instagram or Twitter or send it to melanie@purplepatcharts.org and we’ll put it online for you!