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"Gosh, how I wish we would just get real and say: Ok look, let's not get back on the hamster wheel we were on in 2019. Let's focus on well-being, authentic learning, curiosity, equity. IMAGINE!"
- Julie Stern
Spring Break was just what we all needed - or, at least I did! A chance to catch my breath and relax just a little without worrying daily about the possibility of cases, transitions to online learning or anything else remotely pandemic related. While there was not the usual travel (which somehow now seems like such a distant memory!) nor daily outings with friends and family, there was at least warmth in the air, time to walk in the great outdoors and an escape from the daily routines that begin each morning with the alarm :)
And now we are back with only 3 short months remaining in this wildly unpredictable school year that will forever be framed by pandemic realities and restrictions. There has never been a school year like this in the last 100 years and I sincerely hope we have the fortitude as a society to prepare much better against any future catastrophes so there will never be another! As we look forward to the final three months of the 2020-21 school year, the promise of spring has presented itself with warmer weather, melting snow, sunshine and increasing numbers of vaccinations - even as the threat of variant COVID transmissions and rising caseloads darkens the horizon of 'getting back to normal'.
It appears we will be living with a spring full of both promise and peril.
So, how will we navigate the next three months with these competing influences floating large in the background?
With regard to the COVID risks, we will continue - with increased vigilance and reminders in these early days of spring - to follow all our pandemic protocols listed with the accompanying document in each of our weekly Connect Monday messages to families. So far, we have been most fortunate with limited exposure to the virus within our school. We think this is attributable to both the vigilance of our staff and students as well as our families - you have all been so careful to not send your children to school when then are not feeling well that even instances of the common cold or stomach flus that can ordinarily trouble a school during a school year have been virtually non-existent this year. We applaud your care and thank you for helping us continue to follow every possible precaution during these last months of the school year.
Since we are a school that believes in offering maximum opportunities for students to engage in learning through applying skills, strategies and critical thinking to as many real-life opportunities as possible, we have some significant prospects for student engagement that will keep them busy, focused on learning and active through these final months of this year.
First of all, we are very excited about COULEE SCHOOL! This is not a new adventure for us - we have been connected to the Coulee since we opened way back in the fall of 2017 as part of Tuscany School. Initially it was space constrictions with the two schools sharing tight quarters that led us to consider the Coulee as an excellent site for learning - that, in turn, guided us to a ton of research and possibilities connected to place-based learning and exploring ideas with children related to fitting into all the spaces in our community on a personal as well as public level. For children to fully appreciate place and how they exist within an environment, they need to appreciate who they are within their families, community, city, country and the world, as well as the histories, geographies and biologies of the places where they connect and live.
Coulee School offers so many different opportunities for students to engage in considering the impact of the land, the impact of humans on the land and the interconnectivity of living plants and animals within the environment that children never grow weary of learning and being in the outdoor classroom! For much of April we are focusing on a Coulee School 'blitz' - with several planned in-coulee learning experiences for every class as well as two days of virtual visits and stories with our Blackfoot Elder, Saa'kokoto. We will be sharing much of the students' learning on our Coulee School websites in the coming weeks - you can check out the growing body of documentation from each class/team through the home site at EHS Coulee School Website
Our 5-Year Celebration Murals Project with our Artist in Residence Rebecca Ellison from Radiant Art has, of course, been quite changed as a result of the pandemic. However, artists Rebecca Ellison, Lexi Hilderman and Kristin Boettger are collaborating to offer both virtual and video lessons for our Grade 4 students to complete the construction of the first Mural before the end of the school year - and we have great plans to have it installed before June 30th as well :). Here is the current draft of the Mural the children and the artists have designed together:
We are confident the Grade 4 students will be applying many of the skills, strategies and critical thinking as they work through the creative process, capturing their experiences at EHS over our first 5 years! The remaining Murals are planned to be completed in the fall, hopefully as an authentic Artists-in-Residence experience, involving students from all the other grades as well.
We are also working on developing a temporary Coulee School Information Board to be displayed near/in the Coulee for the final months of the school year - the product of the grant we received from the City of Calgary's 'Embrace the Great Outdoors' campaign. We will have this project finalized by the end of April and look forward to sharing our learnings from and about the Coulee with all of Tuscany soon!
A new project that has just emerged is a natural community art project currently in the planning stages that will also reflect our connections with the Coulee using tree-cookies as the foundation of the art design. We are still in the planning stages of this one, but it will involve all students in the school, be completed by the end of June and displayed on the chain link fence near the playground. Stay tuned for more information on this exciting new learning adventure!
Our Peace Books Video Challenge has launched as well, just before spring break. Spearheaded by our Peace Ambassadors, the video challenge invites students - individually or in teams - to prepare a virtual/digital representation of a favourite Peace book title in video form to share with the school on our EHS YouTube channel. This will be an ongoing project for the next several weeks and we look forward to celebrating students' digital representations of our Peace book collection!
There are numerous other learning opportunities that are planned to carry students successfully and enthusiastically through to the end of this school year - we are not daunted by the impediments of precautions nor worries about eruptions of COVID cases as we contemplate our role as champions of learning at the school. One does not preclude the other - learning that is engaging and meaningful must always be our central purpose and we will continue to foster optimum learning opportunities for every student despite these strange pandemic times!
It is in the learning, in the exploring nature of the curiosities of children, that we find the greatest promise of this 2021 Spring - we hope all our families enjoy the amazing adventures our learners are embarking on as our final three months begins - we look forward to meeting you all on the trails in Tuscany as the Coulee calls us to truly celebrate spring as nature intended. Outdoors in the sunshine!
Lorraine Kinsman
Principal
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