A.H.P. Matthew Elementary 22-23

LITERACY STRENGTHENED THROUGH CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING (SEL) 

At A.H.P. Matthew, we are focused on creating educational opportunities and safe environments for students to develop, practice, and strengthen their social and emotional abilities, which are fundamental to helping students reach their fullest potential. Over the past several years our focus on  Culturally Responsive SEL strove to build learning environments and opportunities that support, sustain, and honour students' diverse backgrounds, identities, strengths, and challenges. As part of our endeavour to continue to honour our learning plans of the past, throughout the school year, we have focused on highlighting various topics, events, and themes to help students discover, understand, and grow their relationship with themselves and others through the development of their Self-Awareness. This year we have expanded our student learning plan to include curricular competencies in the area of Literacy. By developing student's self-awareness, we worked to strengthen their abilities in Language Arts, (reading, writing and oral language). 

Curricular Competency: Our learners can exchange ideas and perspectives to build shared understanding 

Through collaborating, and communicating students gain valuable skills, strategies, and dispositions that help them learn and practice how to work with others to achieve common goals. A.H.P. students can confidently interact and build relationships with their peers to make good choices with one another. Further, they can collaborate with their peers to interact supportively and effectively using inclusive practices to enhance collective understanding. 

Morning meetings are one way that students learn to extend their thinking and build understanding by listening to others, sharing their own viewpoints, and synthesize new information.

Talking sticks were created by our Indigenous students and gifted to each classroom in the school to promote talking circles and Indigenous ways of knowing. This helps our learners to listen and extend their thinking.

Curricular Competency: Our learners can construct meaningful personal connections between self, text and world  

Our learners are developing their literacy skills by building understanding through making connections. Understanding how new information (read, heard, viewed) connects to their existing knowledge helps our students to make decisions, synthesize, and deepen their knowledge base. Students participated in targeted lessons, and units that focussed on how to connect to information both personally, as well as making connections to the world around them. In addition, students 

Core Competencies: Critical Thinking and Reflective Thinking : Our learners can identify and integrate personal, social, and cultural identities

At A.H.P. Matthew, we recognize that students engage in identifying and integrating their personal, social, and cultural identities on a daily basis. Students are self-aware and can describe and identify people, places, and things that are important to them. Using their self-knowledge, students learn to value their personal and cultural narratives to appreciate the various factors (e.g. family background, heritage, language, beliefs) that continue to shape and contribute to a healthy sense of self.  Students are able to practice making open-minded, caring, and constructive choices about their words and behaviours. This year, students at A.H.P were challenged to use their observations, experiences, and imagination to examine their own thinking and that of others. Students continue to reflect on their thoughts, ideas, and assumptions through various learning opportunities in their classrooms and around the school.  

Our Indigenous Students worked to create talking sticks. This allowed them to learn about and strengthen  their connection to their identities. 

Students also had opportunities to focus on developing self-awareness through literacy by strengthening their personal development. Gratitude Week Challenge - For May's Mental Health Awareness Month, our school focused on getting students to reflect on the idea of gratefulness and how they can express gratitude, mindfulness, thankfulness, appreciation, and value towards people in their lives who have helped them learn and grow. Students kept a daily gratitude journal and were given time daily as a school to reflect, and respond to writing prompts.

Our school's Diversity Team Committee  meets once a month to discuss celebrations,  events and initiatives that highlight equity, diversity, and inclusion. Throughout the year, students take charge in creating opportunities to celebrate and highlight various cultural traditions and celebrations. Assemblies, focus days, announcements, bulletins boards, as well as targeted lessons allow students to practice making observations about cultures they are unfamiliar with and continue to reflect on their thoughts, ideas, and assumptions about their existing knowledge and new facts have learned. Some of the cultural celebrations we have had this year include Black History Month, Diwali, International Women's Day, Lunar New Year, Asian Heritage Month, Hannukah, and Vaisakhi.

Our learners can examine prejudices, biases, and diverse social norms

Core Competencies: Critical Thinking, Communication, Personal and Social Responsibility.

Students in our cohort classrooms participated in Freedom to Read Week. Teachers shared texts that had been previously, or are currently banned, in places around the world. Teachers taught lessons about the importance of protecting intellectual freedoms and examined many books that had been banned for various reasons including topics such as challenging corporations, bi-racial relationships, gender/sexual identity, and others.  Students examined why the book was banned, who was trying to keep the message from reaching the audience, and why it would be important to protect the message/values that the author was representing. Our learners presented their learning at a school-wide assembly to culminate the week of activities.  

Intermediate classes within our cohort also participated in a collaborative unit with the Teacher-Librarian on Critical Literacy. Students engaged in collaborative inquiry to understand which voices and perspectives were being represented in various texts. They considered questions such as:  

• How do your identities affect your understanding of the text? 
• Who is talking the most? Who is not talking at all? (Who has power?) 
• What values are represented in the words and pictures? and who is missing?  

Students worked on being aware of bias, prejudice, and power imbalance in what they are reading to understand the perspectives being reflected to the audience. Expanding our students’ awareness of text was a key aspect of this unit.  

Many students over the last two years have participated in our Social Justice Club. This club seeks to raise awareness of social injustices, and promote understanding around diversity, equity and inclusion. Students fundraised for charity, led awareness-campaigns promoting kindness, and created a mural for our school. The mural serves as a reminder to all students and families that AHP is a welcoming and inclusive community.