Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Jan 19/00) - When they added the 4,000th piece, students and staff at J.H. Sissons school did it with the satisfaction of at least knowing their millennium jigsaw puzzle was half done.

Completed Jan. 12, the puzzle offers a chronological history of the millennium. The main element is a spiral of 200 cartoon panels, each panel depicting the scientific, artistic and historic highlights of the decade.

"My son and I came across it in the window of a puzzle shop when we were in Montreal last summer," says Sissons librarian Lynn Taylor.

"I thought it would be a nice way for the school to mark the millennium. But at the time we got it we didn't know it would be so hard."

The puzzle is so big, pieces for each half of it came in separate bags and it was assembled one half at a time. The school started their work of art Sept. 20.

"It took an hour a side just to turn over the pieces, and then we started sorting by colours," says Taylor.

Though all students and staff helped with the enormous job, some were more inspired by the challenge than others.

French immersion teacher, and jigsaw puzzle fan extraordinaire, Marie-Francoise Le Doze and her Grade 5 class took up the challenge with extra gusto. So did Taylor and school custodian Alvina Galloway.

Le Doze said the size of the puzzle and similarities of different parts is what made it tricky to put together.

"That was the difficult part, a lot of things are the same," said Le Doze.

"There are crusades all over and, see, the (several frames of) Mongols over there."

Those who assembled the puzzle were guided by a poster showing the finished design. Still, due to the extraordinary number of pieces, and the similarities, sometimes work they thought was OK had to be undone.

"Some pieces would actually fit, but they were not the right piece for the right place," says Taylor.

Then there's the setback the team suffered early on in the process. It appears a pre-schooler, biding his time in the library where the puzzle was being assembled, tore apart all the work that had been done.

Nobody made a big deal out of it, because the child was too young to know what they were doing.