Reports

Monday by Touko and Aleksi

Opening ceremony

At the start of the day the school held an opening ceremony. The headmaster warmly welcomed the foreign visitors from Estonia and Lithuania. After the welcoming words, the 7th graders put on a short music performance. Then the head of the student council, Heta, with Aleksi’s help, gave a brief but interesting presentation about the activities and companies in Lappajärvi and the birth of the lake.

Google Meet and Abitti

We experimented on our conferencing system, Google Meet and on our digital course exam system, Abitti. We took a quiz in Abitti about literature and Finland. The quiz was quite hard for everyone and it boiled down to just guessing for a lot of people. Then we went to eat at  the vocational school cafeteria. The cafeteria was filled to the brim and the atmosphere was intense.

Field trip and water samples

The teachers gave us instructions about getting water samples from Lake Lappajärvi. We were divided into 4 different groups. Each group took two samples from two different locations. The locations were Halkosaari and Tarvola. The samples from Halkosaari were marked with the letter A and from Tarvola with B. The samples were taken from the depth of 1 meter. The temperatures were taken on the spot and they were about 2.2℃.

It also offered the foreigners a chance to make a little sightseeing tour of Lappajärvi.

Get-together games

Lastly, we had different games in the auditorium of the school. These games were centered around names. It was a great way to get to know everyone’s name and everybody had a great time.

Youth Center

In the evening foreigners and their hosts went to Lappajärvi youth center. Some people played table tennis, air hockey and a dancing game called Just Dance. It was an enjoyable experience for a lot of people.

Tuesday (Science day) by Valerija and Ivan

Lab work

From 9 o’clock we started with our project team to do different lab works. As on Monday we went out from school to pick up local water samples, on Tuesday we examined all water samples from Lithuania, Finland and Estonia. We recorded the level of oxygen of the water, the water pH, conductivity, nitrate and so on.

Lunch

After all the samples were checked, we went to have lunch. The lunch was quite good and we liked it very much.

Reports/Fish

With a full belly of food we went to write reports and analyse all the data with another group. Our group analyzed water from Lithuanian lake and river and we decided that it’s good and not too polluted. After that we changed places with two other groups and went to dissect fish. It was quite a doubtful pleasure, but many liked it very much.

Evening

In the evening we had different activities. Some students went to play basketball at school , some went to Kivitippu to do Kaisla’s workout, but some were tired and just spent time with their host families at home.

Wednesday by Paulius and Kaius

Activities at Kivitippu

Meeting with a representative of the municipality

The business consultant of the municipality Pauli Kankaanpää told about the history and entrepreneurship of Lappajärvi.

Visiting the meteorite exhibition

We saw many different types of rocks and learned how they were formed. We also did a quiz on the Universe, meteorites and rock types.

The film The Birth of a Lake

The film was a documentary about the Finnish lakes and nature of Finland, as well as the circulation of water and old Finnish mythology. We learned a lot about the fauna and flora of Finland.

Lunch

The food and drinks were very tasty. We got much energy for the rest of the day.

The fire station rescue demonstration

We saw a very professional demonstration of how the firemen save people who are trapped in an ice hole. The emergency display was about two men walking on the frozen lake when they suddenly fall through the ice. A passer-by spots them and calls the emergency number. The fire brigade arrives with a hovercraft and a driver and a rescue swimmer. There is also a rescue board with rescue swimmers. The demonstration is carried out as if it were a true emergency situation and the fire engine comes straight from the fire station as in a real life alarm response.

It is important to get the victims out of the water as soon as possible. Within three minutes your body starts to freeze which makes it harder to get out of the icy water. There are only two firemen working full-time in Lappajärvi fire station, but there are a few volunteer firemen to help them.

After the demonstration some of the spectators got onboard the hovercraft and had a little ride on the lake. It was quite exciting!

Sports activities

We had a great choice of things that we could do: floorball and activities in the pool, sauna and gym. Floorball is a rapid, sweaty game in which the situations change quickly. Everybody could get their turn to try and score a goal. Lots of students plunged into the swimming pool, relaxed in a jacuzzi and the sauna, whereas some went to the gym to work out.

Thursday by Niklas and Oskari

We went to Vaasa by bus, which took about two hours. On the bus we got information about the landscape and nature around Kvarken, the narrowest strait between Finland and Sweden.

Söderfjärden

The Söderfjärden meteorite crater is 10 km from Vaasa. We were given a lecture and we saw animations about meteorite strikes and asteroids. The exhibition in the small museum tells about the long history of at least 520 million years of Söderfjärden. There is a bird-watching tower in the middle of the most important resting area for cranes in Finland. 

Raippaluoto

We visited The House of the Seas by the bridge of Raippaluoto. The presenter introduced the Kvarken archipelago which is a one of the world heritage sites. He then explained about the land uplift: the land is rising 8 mm every year so in maybe 2000 years one is able to walk from Finland to Sweden.

Lunch

We went to eat at the university of Vaasa (Mathilda). 

Vaasa City Art Gallery  

The exhibition was called SEA SISTERS IN ANTHROPOCENE. The sea sisters consist of four women who produce ecological art.The artists are Kati Immonen, Mari Krappala, Elina Ruohonen and Tiina Vainio. They are worried about the state of the Baltic Sea and they want to show that human action has changed the natural world. Some of the pieces of art carried messages that made you wonder about things from a different point of view. Plants and animals seemed to have something to tell us.

Free time

We had three hours of free time. People spent their free time in different ways, for example bowling, shopping and eating.

Friday

Workshops

On Friday we had three workshops. You could choose the arts, photography or news workshop. In the arts workshop the students created posters or other pieces of work about climate change or the pollution of water. In the photo workshop they put up a photo gallery of the photos taken in Lithuania, Estonia and Finland. All photos had the same theme - water in its different forms from the autumn till the spring. In the newsroom they wrote the reports on the previous days and chose pictures to go with them.

Concert

At noon we had a folk concert by the group Poja! They played several old instruments and sang traditional songs and their own compositions.

Feedback and certificates 

After the concert we could go and see what the other groups had done, gave some feedback and finally received the Nordplus certificates.

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