Week Three: September 21-25
Updated: Oct 4
Our week began with Solstice Celebration around our morning circle, our first community drum birthing ceremony of the year, and planning for Share The Magic Day sale items to connect our curriculum to business. We did not share any new teachings this week, and instead reviewed our previous teachings, growing more familiar with our friends Ma'iingaan, Kitchi Sabe, Bison, and Ears (our capacity to be disciplined).
We continue to enjoy calendar time, as our teachers take over running it, while sharing the process with the students so they may eventually do the same. Our Helping Hands chart identifies a Calendar Monitor each week. The Calendar Monitor's role currently, is to confirm all parts of Calendar time are covered. In future, their job will shift to leading Calendar with teacher support and/or independently. Children learn best when they teach one another. Our Calendar time ends with our Helping Hands Weather Reporter learning and sharing about the temperature outside by reading from our remote weather station that sits inside the classroom. For now, our Weather Reporter is learning to read the numbers on the display screen and receives support to plot the temperature on our annual temperature graph. We keep track of the weather every school day, so students can have a visual experience of the trend of the temperature over different periods of time. We keep our date from previous years and look at high and low temperature recordings over time to see if there are any trends.
We reviewed our school contract on our whiteboard, reminding ourselves of the most important words and actions. Each student that agreed they would do their best to keep our contract signed the board, then Emma led an active agreement with the students to get their bodies involved in the contract as well.
Language time this week saw our Postmaster delivering the mail for the week. Every student had a letter from someone with a question to be answered. Every student wrote a letter in return to their individual capacities and with teacher supports along the way with words. All students appear very engaged during our letter writing time, and are excited to receive mail in return.
Our Drum Birthing Ceremony was held twice this week, once on Monday morning and once on Thursday morning to ensure we were able to honour everyone. It was a beautiful experiencing with a little fire satefy and information attached. Students collected the sticks to feed our fires during their lunch breaks on Monday and Thursday.
Our afternoon lessons were full of gardening, foraging and learning the ins and outs of our plant relatives that we plant and pick for various purposes. Students learned about ginger, potato, kale, linden berries, marshmallow cheeses and colts foot this week in depth. We hunted and harvested all week so we can have some very special items to share with families on Share the Magic day this coming Saturday. We also learned about Snails, why we keep them in their own habitat and how we can honour them and Ma'iingan by remembering that we are one strand in the web of life, and we do not pull the strings of other members of the web.
On Friday we foraged for the elusive Marshmallow Cheeses that we could only find few of the other days we looked. We finally managed to find enough to make our homemade marshmallows! We hiked all the way to the swings using our map and passed by two places where Marshmallow had been growing undisturbed all season. We also harvested and cleaned up our Linden Berries (Canadian Chocolate Berries).
Our first Spirit Day was a blast as we played lots of games all afternoon and we had many people attend as their favourite character in costume!
FIRST PARENT COMMUNITY MEETING
Monday evening we had our first Parent Community Meeting as well! It was lovely to see everyone who was able to make it out. We shared our first 4 teachings of the year (Respect, Discipline, Honesty and Humility) AND had a fun little competition in groups to identify who remembered what they read in their Welcome Package that we all signed. We do this activity to identify who might not be aware of some of our foundational rules. One thing that was mentioned was the addition of candy in student lunches. While we understand that you want to give your child a sweet treat, or maybe your child packs their own lunch, we do ask, and we all signed in agreement, that candy would not be included in lunches at school. Our reasoning behind this is that it makes it far more tricky for students to regulate their emotions when they are eating candy. Candy is defined as chocolate bars, lollipops, and in general anything high in sugar content without much else. If you have questions about this definition, please reach out to Jessica so she can help clarify if that is needed. We also will not be checking lunches and we will never say anything to students about what to eat first, etc, however candy will never escape our notice. We will always suggest students listen to their own bodies and do what feels best for them.
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