"If you’re involved in education in any way, then you are acutely aware of how challenging the last few school years have been for our students. This is especially true for our youngest learners. While young children can quickly adapt to new situations and are astoundingly resilient, they are coping with a lot—both in and outside of school. " - Jennifer Orr
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We are a Kindergarten - Grade 4 school - learners who register with us for Kindergarten have the opportunity to spend five years in our school if they register for our half-day Kindie program and stay in the community for all five years.
This is the ideal situation for learners because it provides opportunities for them to build expected behaviours, routines and learning practices the school intentionally plans to provide successful, engaging academic and social experiences for every child.
Since the spring of 2020 when the pandemic first impacted our world, educators have not been able to provide the same opportunities for children to learn, socialize, engage and participate in 'school' experiences that we know will provide optimum academic achievement and social growth.
Our routines have orbited around safe health practices, as have our learning opportunities. When routines and learning opportunities are not able to be offered in the intentional ways we know will best meet our young learners' needs, their social/emotional development is impacted as well, since the situations where they would typically learn to interact, solve problems and develop positive communication strategies are interrupted too.
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"There have been many difficult moments for many different students and problem solving with them has not been easy. Some students can talk through difficult moments, problem solve together, and advocate for their needs. Many other students cannot. " - Jennifer Orr
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As a Peace Education school, we have intentionally developed routines and strategies intended to support our learners' overall academic/social/emotional growth from Kindergarten through to Grade 4. Teaching principles of kindness, joy, harmony and peace through literature, service projects, exploring simple social justice issues, community initiatives, stories, Roots of Empathy and shared experiences, our learners gradually build on early experiences with understanding how to approach the world through lenses of kindness, joy, harmony and peace to support each other and communicate effectively.
As learners progress from Kindergarten through to Grade 4, they begin to see themselves as positive members of a community and acquire communication skills that effectively solve problems, support children to see each other as capable and unique, approach adverse situations from a solutions-focused perspective. This is achieved through developing intentional opportunities for active learning in a wide variety of situations throughout the school year, and offering opportunities for children to engage in whatever learning supports that will help them learn and socialize most successfully (such as SPARK, Calm, Ignite Time, Wonder Time, Discovery, etc).
When we opened EHS, we began this intentional weaving of multiple learning opportunities with social/emotional teachings, knowing this would yield a pattern of student leaders across the school as each year's incoming new learners would be immersed with peers who have already developed communication and learning strategies to support optimum growth. And we were able to celebrate and experience this for the first four years - the sudden pandemic shut down of March, 2020 also slammed the door on this best laid plan.
We now have three years' of learners - those who entered grade 1 in 2020, 2021 and 2022 - whose beginning experiences of school have not included the usual level of interaction, group learning, shared experiences and shared communication we would typically design and offer in our school. While we have worked hard to try and offer as many learning opportunities as possible, with the various constraints and occasional episodes of online learning, most learners have not been able to participate in the more open, spontaneous learning and socialization experiences that best support optimal academic growth and communication development. While I have noted the three years of grade 1 entry as experiencing significant interruptions, there have been impacts on all students - even students in grade 4 this year have only had two years (grades 1 and 2) of expected, intentional school-based experiences.
Simultaneously, social interactions outside of school such as participation with sports teams, birthday parties, play dates, dance, music lessons, family or friend gatherings, etc. have all been interrupted too.
As all of society begins to grapple with 'living with COVID', there is considerable conversation occurring about 'getting back to normal'. The problem with the call to return to normal is that there really isn't any normal to return to in a school setting - for most of our learners, not communicating with anyone outside of a select group (i.e. your classmates) is what they know and, when they do try to interact with someone new outside of their tightly cohorted circle, there are very few problem solving strategies that have been practiced successfully ready to be used immediately. Students do not have previous experiences working in bigger spaces with multiple learners from other classes or grade levels so entering into a new learning opportunity is no longer routine and knowing how to do this successfully is a skill many children have yet to acquire.
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