Monday, September 28 (Picture Day Tomorrow!)

 Hi parents,

We had a pretty good day today! As the year progresses, you'll probably notice that my Monday blog posts get more and more repetitive. This is because we tend to do the same sorts of activities on Mondays. I feel like starting the week with familiar, comfortable tasks helps the students transition more easily from weekend-mode to school-mode.

Today was no exception. The students wrote in their journals about their weekends, learned and practiced their new spelling words, and did a 'Number Spotlight' on 14. 

We started to talk about Orange Shirt Day, which is coming up on Wednesday, September 30. Students are asked to wear orange shirts on Wednesday to celebrate Reconciliation and pay respect to the Indigenous peoples whose lives have been affected by Residential Schools. Reconciliation is a very big topic and I do not expect children to understand much of it at this point in their education. I also understand that going into too much detail about Residential Schools could be very upsetting for young children, so I try to focus more on discussing what school should be like, and explaining that many indigenous youth did not get to experience the same fun, comfortable, and safe kind of school that we are accustomed to. 

I think this video does a good job of summarizing Orange Shirt Day in a way that is appropriate for young children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3vUqr01kAk

Anyway - that was a bit of a tangent. When I said we started to talk about Orange Shirt Day, I mean we mostly just discussed what the terms 'indigenous' and 'First Nations' meant. We talked about how students' in our classroom have family trees that come from all kinds of different places around the world, like China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Korea, India... I explained to the class that that First Nations peoples of Canada come from families that ave always lived in Canada, even before it was called Canada. We watched this episode of Canada Crew again too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztodE6_6qb4

Tomorrow is Picture Day! 

Unfortunately, this year we are unable to get full class pictures taken, so this will just be for individual headshots. 

Have a nice night,

Zac