Marine life in Alaska

sea otter

Star fish

Salmon (paper mache)

map with coast line

http://www.alaskacruises.com/cruises/marine-life-in-alaska.html

http://www.3dham.com/3dgalleries/starfish/batstar.html

Alaska and the Iditarod

http://www.iditarod.com/learn/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iditarod_Trail_Sled_Dog_Race

Prince Edward Island

Lucy Maud Montgomery "Anne of Green Gables"

While she gained her greatest fame from the Anne of Green Gables series, Montgomery was a prolific writer, publishing 20 novels and more than 500 short stories and poems. Understanding the conditions of Montgomery’s own childhood and upbringing, you can see its influence and inspiration in the books of Anne of Green Gables.

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was born in Clifton (now called New London), Prince Edward Island, daughter of Hugh John Montgomery and Clara Woolner Macneill. Her twenty-three-year-old mother died of tuberculosis when Maud was just twenty-one months old, and her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy MacNeill, took over her care at the MacNeill homestead in Cavendish. She grew up in the seaside fishing and farming community, and knew intimately all of its beaches, woods, fields, and homes.

In 1890 she was invited to visit her father and his new wife in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Homesick for PEI and not getting along with her new stepmother, Maud returned in 1891.

Maud graduated from Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown in 1894 and received a first-class teacher's license. At the convocation exercises, she read her essay on Shakespeare's "Portia" to an appreciative audience. Her first teaching job was in Bideford,Prince Edward Island and the Bideford Parsonage, where she boarded that winter, is now a museum in her honor.

Maud Montgomery saved just enough money in her first year of teaching to pay for one year at Dalhousie University in Halifax, thinking that a course in English literature might aid her writing career. She received her first payment for a poem while in Halifax, and won a newspaper contest for writing. She returned to PEI and continued teaching in different communities across the province. Apart from a ten-month stint as a newspaper reporter on the Halifax Daily Echo (1901-1902), she stayed with her grandmother until Lucy Woolner MacNeill died in 1911. She had many activities to keep her busy in Cavendish, she photographed, she worked on the Cavendish Literary Magazine, she kept scrapbooks and a journal, and she wrote and published poetry and short stories. She was ambitious to earn a living by her pen.

In 1906 Maud became engaged to Presbyterian minister, Ewan Macdonald. However, Maud was determined to stay with and care for her grandmother so that she could remain in her old home, so the two could not wed for another five years. Meanwhile, Montgomery decided to take the time away from her lucrative short story writing to write a novel. Anne of Green Gables was rejected several times before it was finally accepted by the L.C. Page Company in Boston. It was published in 1908 and became an immediate success.

Anne of Green Gables changed Montgomery’s life. Suddenly she was a celebrity and began receiving fan mail. She earned what for the times was an enormous amount, despite the small royalty of the Page contract. For the rest of her life, she was to be famous and sought after.