Hats off to the province's teachers and students for enduring the seemingly never-ending days of wickedly cold weather. At a point when it becomes unsafe for children to be outside during extremely cold weather, schools in the province have resorted to in-class recesses and break times. What is usually a rare occurrence in a prairie winter has become an interminable string of cold weather alert days. At least that's according to the staff of one Humboldt school. When asked how many days students had been confined to the indoors during recess, St. Dominic School vice-principal Celeste Leray-Leicht replied without hesitation: 1,053. While colleague Andrea Fossen laughed, she didn't dispute her.

The unusually long stretch of cold weather has necessitated that students stay indoors and that teachers support their students in finding alternative activities to being in the great outdoors. Of course there were options for students to head to the gym for a pickup game of basketball, supervised by one of the staff. As for the other, there was no lack of indoor activities. Some students gathered in the computer lab for a technology break. Others were in classrooms with games, with learning tools, or working on a school-based reading project. The halls were crackling as the students bustled from one thing to another, trying to burn off the stored up energy from their studies.

Leray-Leicht indicated that the Greater Saskatoon School Division provides guidelines for outdoor activities in cold weather. "Generally minus 25 degrees is the temperature where students will be required to remain indoors, especially if there is a wind," she noted. 

Even though the days are growing noticeably longer, the persistent cold air mass may be with us a while longer. The first outdoor recess following the cold snap will be a welcome one.