Coast Meridian Elementary
OUR CONTEXT
Coast Meridian Elementary strives to create a sense of community with our students, their families, and educators. We embrace a diverse and creative community of learners and value each of those learners by creating safe learning environments, encouraging a growth mindset, and helping them understand themselves and others. At Coast Meridian, your story is important to us.
Learning Environment & Guiding Principles
At Coast Meridian, learning environments differ depending on our students’ needs with a common goal of:
Creating a safe learning space by harbouring openness, trust, and honesty. A safe learning space allows our students to be open and honest with their struggles and celebrate their accomplishments.
Fostering a sense of wonder and inquiry by providing students with a creative space, taking their diverse tastes and personalities into consideration.
Creating a sense of joy by providing engaging opportunities to learn and grow in all learning environments from the classroom to the library, extra-curricular activities, and explorations in our community forest.
Providing an opportunity to reflect on their learning and be aware of their growth by sharing what they know, wonder, and learned. Allowing students to see their growth and progress instills a growth mindset.
OUR LEARNERS
OUR FOCUS
According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), “Social and Emotional Learning is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions”.
The SEL Competencies we focus on in relation to Self-Awareness include:
Integrating personal and social identities
Identifying one’s emotions
Demonstrating honesty and integrity
Linking feelings, values and thoughts
Having a growth mindset
Developing interests and a sense of purpose
The SEL Competencies we focused on in relation to Social-Awareness include:
Taking others’ perspectives
Demonstrating empathy and compassion
Understanding and expressing gratitude
Through this journey, many classes participated in the focus of Social, and Emotional Learning. Our focused cohort includes Kindergarten, Grade 4 and our Grade 6/7 Intensive French classes. In each of these classes, students learn how to identify feelings and various strategies for self-regulation. Students will generate solutions to problems by thinking through possible solutions and outcomes. Students will also practice self-reflection skills to explore their overall well-being and their own personal sense of identity.
OUR NEXT STEPS
Moving forward, we will continue to build relationships, and an emotionally safe and welcoming environment for our students. We will focus on building emotional literacy skills and to collect strategies for self regulation. We will continue to build upon a positive sense of self identity.
Students will continue to participate in these activities and conversations with a united focus, changing each month and building upon each other. Our plan for some of these school-wide activities are as follows:
Our SEL committee will:
- continue to meet and review the plan created in May 2022 for the 2022/23 school year
- review the evidence of learning from the cohorts that were collected in the spring of 2022
- administer a survey to establish a new baseline for our SEL skills to help monitor and inform our SEL practice as we move forward
- continue to collect data throughout the year through evidence, surveys, interviews, and observations of students in both structured and non structured environments
- explore integration of the First Peoples' Principles of Learning and the Seven Sacred Teachings in the areas of SEL and academic growth
Surrey Schools
Formed in 1906, the Surrey School District currently has the largest student enrolment in British Columbia and is one of the few growing districts in the province. It is governed by a publicly elected board of seven trustees.
The district serves the cities of Surrey and White Rock and the rural area of Barnston Island.
