KINNGAIT/CAPE DORSET - If there is one thing 11-year-old Joanne Weedmark will remember about her trip to Toronto it will be this: "The next station is Dundas. Dundas station."

The Grade 6 student from Sam Pudlat School in Cape Dorset said the recorded announcements on the first subway rides of her life definitely got stuck in her head.

Eleven-year-old Joanne Weedmark from Sam Pudlat School in Cape Dorset performs a drum dance for students at Forest Hill Junior Public School in Toronto last month. - photo courtesy of Bill Waldman

"When it went 'next stop is Dundas,' I kept on saying it because I heard it lots of times," she said.

Weedmark was one of a group of 31 students, artists and elders from the community who travelled to Toronto last month to share Inuit culture and learn about Canada's largest city.

"I met the mayor," she said. "They gave us city hall pens and city hall pins."

Toronto mayor David Miller said he was impressed by how engrossed the group was by visiting city hall.

"It was excellent how curious and interested they were," he said.

Teacher Mark Caine from Sam Pudlat School organized the trip after doing a unit called "All About Me" with his class.

"I realized they've never seen a tree, or been on an escalator, elevator," he said.

"I called several schools in Toronto to see if they would be interested in hosting us. We'd like to share Inuit culture and art and at the same time take the students out in Toronto and look at all the sites and witness some of the things other students their age are doing."

One of the six schools the group visited was Forest Hill Junior Public School where principal Bill Waldman jumped on the idea after Caine's former colleague told him about the plan.

"One of the teachers who worked with him in the past brought it to my attention and we were very excited about the project and wanted to be involved," Waldman said. "They were there all day. The first half of the morning we were sharing with them what education in Toronto is like, and the second half of the day they were sharing some of their culture with us."

All of the students participated in workshops throughout the day such as showing the Cape Dorset students an interactive whiteboard and performing West Side Story. The Cape Dorset students performed throat singing and Inuit games while the carvers demonstrated soapstone carving in front of the school.

"We brought elders with us and famous carvers and two high school students and 16 elementary school students," Caine said.

Forest Hill student Evan Goldman said he noticed Inuit games didn't require much equipment.

"The games were much more physical. They would do things with their bodies instead of with balls and things like that," he said. "I thought it was really interesting and it was really fun because they taught a lot of different games and they showed different music like throat singing."

Student Ramsha Naveed said she enjoyed teaching the kids from Cape Dorset clapping games.

"I thought it was interesting and the kids were really nice and friendly," she said. "We taught them a couple of our games like Stella Ella Olla and they were quick learners."

Weedmark said she really enjoyed visiting the schools, but her adventure took her to many other places in Toronto as well.

She said she enjoyed going to the Toronto Zoo where she saw elephants, which were her favourite animals in the zoo.

She also slid down the waterslide in the pool of the Delta Chelsea hotel "maybe a hundred times."

Waldman said despite the distance between Cape Dorset and Toronto, all of the children shared similar interests.

"Despite the fact that the kids come from several thousand kilometres apart and are obviously from very different cultures, kids are kids," he said. "A lot of the things that interest our kids are the same things that interest their kids."

Caine said he plans to do the trip again next year.

"Apparently it was a huge thing for Toronto and they want to do that now every year and we'll visit seven different schools," he said. "We're going to do it again."