The Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore Website Update

The Kule Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore is pleased to announce a major update to its Shkola website at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/Shkola. This website assembles materials for the Ukrainian bilingual program. It contains pictures and videos from Ukraine. Emphasis is on children and their lives.

The website shows a city apartment and a village house. Both are available in 3-D Virtual Reality so that the visitor can "walk around" the dwelling and look inside various rooms. Several of the dwellings have "guided tours" provided by the Ukrainian child living there.

There are pictures of household items such as furniture and household goods such as milk, juice, bread, and so forth. One village has a short video of baba providing a tour of her garden and speaking about her vegetables. There are units on shopping and on transportation. The shopping unit shows stores, kiosks, markets, and the products sold in each.

One unit shows schools. It includes pictures of school interiors, children providing tours of the school, and a video of the "first bell," the ceremony marking the beginning of the school year. The unit on games has children introducing themselves, then giving a description of their games, then demonstrating how each game is played.

Some units have an interactive "find the (moloko, boroshno, derevo, domovyk)" feature and more such "quizzes" are being constructed. Workbooks that can be downloaded and printed out are also planned.

The text is in Ukrainian and the materials selected are geared to the Alberta recommendations for Ukrainian Language Arts: Kindergarten through Grade 9. The website is also being used in Saskatchewan and Manitoba and is under consideration in other provinces.

Feedback is welcome. Please write to nataliek@ualberta.ca or peter.holloway@ualberta.ca.