I. General Information
School Name: Arden
School District: SD#71 Comox Valley
Inquiry Team Members: KatieArsenault: katie.arsenault@sd71.bc.ca, Michelle Honeysett: michelle.honeysett@sd71.bc.ca, Leah Llloyd: leah.lloyd@sd71.bc.ca, Carlene Steeves: carlene.steeves@sd71.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: katie.arsenault@sd71.bc.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE Case Study
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Primary (K-3)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Arts Education, Language Arts – Oral Language, Physical & Health Education, Science, Social Studies, Other: Outdoor education, place based learning, and social emotional learning
Focus Addressed: Indigenous Focus (for example, Traditional Knowledge, oral history, reconciliation), Literacy, Core competencies (for example, critical thinking, communication, problem solving), Land, Nature or Place-based learning, Self-regulation
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? How can we meet the social and emotional needs of our students and their families while transitioning to kindergarten?
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning: Over the past 3 years, our collaborative group has been adapting our ways to support families and transitions to kindergarten. We have partnered with a Strong Start teacher from another school to develop more support for our families. We have started to provide extra opportunities to have families come to the school before gradual entry to kindergarten. We have provided extra playtimes, group singing, and forest walk opportunities to help families and and students feel more comfortable.
Focus: We have joined a professional development group about social and emotional learning that supports early learning social emotional well being. We are using the ELF, Play, The Art of Awareness, and Really Seeing Children, and the Social Emotional Learning Toolbox as resources. We as a team have joined a collaborative group about Social Emotional Transition for Early Learning. We have paired with our early learning principal, strong start teachers, and ECE’s that are in our areas to discuss and support our families and learners. We will continue to explore other avenues to explore social and emotional learning, transitions, and collaboratively problem solving with others to support students.
Hunch: We assumed that families were receiving e-mails that give a little heads up about the kindergarten year coming up. We assumed that families were cued into their children attending kindergarten before it happened. We assumed that parents and children would willingly attend welcome to K sessions. We assumed that parents have time off to join us during the day. We had a hunch that other community pre-kindergartens knew the information to pass on to future kindergarten families.
New Professional Learning: We have joined a professional development group about social and emotional learning that supports early learning social emotional well being. We are using the ELF, Play, The Art of Awareness, and Really Seeing Children, and the Social Emotional Learning Toolbox as resources. We as a team have joined a collaborative group about Social Emotional Transition for Early Learning. We have paired with an early learning principal, strong start teachers, and ECE’s that are in our areas to discuss and support our families and learners. We will continue to explore other avenues to explore social and emotional learning, transitions, and collaboratively problem solving with others to support students.
Taking Action: I teach in a very collaborative model, and we work together as a trio. All of the kids are our students and we all teach each one of them in a collaborative capacity. Over the course of the last 3 years, we have continued to make efforts to reach out in different ways to families of transitioning kindergarten children.
This year we joined with a group of educators from a variety of locations, positions, and age levels under the age of six, to problem solve and provide an objective lens to what we were doing currently, what was working and what changes needed to be made. Through conversations with a variety of these community members we were able to address some issues we were noticing. With several collaborative conversations, many helpful suggestions and trials were executed.
We had several after school meetings to discuss what we could do differently. It was suggested that we have an information session for Early Childhood Educators to demystify the understandings of what kindergarten will be like. We provided a 2 hour session open to select school district employees, principals, ECE from our community and other kindergarten teachers as well. As a collaborative team, we broke our session into facilitating independence in three distinct categories. Readiness skills, emotional transitions, and shape of the day. We broke into 3 groups and experienced each of our classrooms with a brief orientation into each of our classrooms. We had excellent feedback from these sessions and continued to move forward. As kindergarten classes, we asked our current students about what they have learned in kindergarten already. Then we took that evidence about learning in kindergarten, amalgamated these, and created posters for each attendee to take back to their sites with them. During our dinner session we also created a picture slide show of all the activities our kids experience each day.
After the session we met again as a group. We again reflected about what went well and what could be done differently. Together we brainstormed ideas that could help our future students and families feel more comfortable at school. A suggestion was made to create little videos that were sound bites that families could access as many times as they needed about what kindergarten looked like.
As the official district welcome to kindergarten date approached, we invited families to meet us once a week during our morning gathering in the outdoor classroom. Families were e-mailed and encouraged to join our land acknowledgment, our songs and stretches, and our daily forest walk. Many families joined us. We also extended this opportunity to our newly built on-site Boys and Girls club care centre. Many soon to be K’s and little littles also joined because of this.
As the year progressed, we had many opportunities to meet and greet our new to K families and by the time that the district welcome to kindergarten started, we had met almost all of our future families. The night before our Welcome to K we had a parent session to meet just with parents and give them a tour of the school, our classrooms, and to answer any questions they were curious about. We followed an abridged model of our care providers night with less information. We started in the outdoor classroom so families could get a sense of what our day begins like and then we visited all the classrooms. We ended with an open group question and answer period at the end. We also put up a sign-up poster to ask parents if there was a time that worked better for any parent sessions that may come up. We gave the opportunity to have parents either voice out loud among the group or leave a sticky note with any questions or concerns they had.
The following early evening we had our Welcome to K sessions where we provide an open centre concept to visit all the important people to meet and areas in the school they will be attending. Our staff is very supportive and we have most staff paired or independently manning a station. Parents said they felt settled and could help guide their students from one place to another and also many of the parents had face to face conversations with us already so they were more comfortable with us as the future teachers. Kids had their standard bag and then we always provide a litterless snack bag to model our garbageless lunch, we provide little treasures in each classroom that adds to their standard bag and supports the curriculum they will experience.
A month later we provided another special night for families. We had a scavenger hunt where families were given clues and then had to collect letters and then together as a family solve a word puzzle. Once families collected all letters and solved the puzzle students were given a special nature explorer bag full of our curriculum support and nature ambassador tools. There were a few outdoor/ nature scavenger hunt papers, a pencil, a notebook, a magnifying glass, and a side bag to hold all the materials and a reference book.
We continued to have our families join our Wednesday woods walk until the last week of school. We provided families an opportunity to join a K to play in the afternoon. We provided a weekly play hour in a rotation of our classrooms to have families have personal experience in all the classrooms and with all their future kindergarten teachers.
As mentioned before, it was suggested that we provide a video to share information in another way. We had a videographer meet with us. We collaboratively decided what points were important to share with families and provided a series of mini video clips to share what our everyday at Kindergarten looked like. We created a series of five videos to demonstrate this and broke the information into five categories; shape of the day, who we are, building independence, transitions in school, arrival and departures. We decided to send these video clips out in a scheduled manner so that families would have more communication from their teachers throughout the summer and be able to refer to videos as many times as needed.
The last attempt to improve the kindergarten transition process after speaking to families and getting a sense of what their concerns were. As a result, we decided to pilot starting kindergarten right away and not having a gradual entry process anymore. We have heard and experienced that this schedule is very difficult for families to manage, and was also challenging as their teachers to utilize personnel.
Checking: I believe all our efforts made a difference. We have now met everyone of our future kindergarten students that will start next year, except for one. We have used a variety of methods to communicate what can be expected for next year. We have spoken to a majority of students and their families. We have had many communications such as videos and e-mails sent out already to families. Among our trio kindergarten team we have had very positive feedback so far. Many of the families have responded already about how appreciative they are of the efforts we have gone to. A connection with community members has also been forged through this process.
Reflections/Advice: We have learned that three years ago we were on the right track about making stronger connections with families. Families were needing more support about how to approach kindergarten, what they needed to know, what was expected and what could families do to help support a better transition into kindergarten. Demystifying the idea around kindergarten expectations, that printing your name and knowing their letters is a parent’s job, it is literally in our kindergarten curriculum to teach. Through this process, the importance of connection, relationships, communication, and time together was emphasized. Parents were so appreciative of the process and how approachable we were as teachers. Parents mentioned they were truly able to chat and reassure their children about what was to come and the importance of face to face connection.
As teachers we will continue to use the videos we created to explain our program. Our district early years principal has encouraged us to share our ideas and process and so we are presenting as a team at an early years conference next year in October. Also, she wants to use the concept of our videos and how we continue to reach out to families across the district as a model or as a jumping point for other programs or kindergarten teachers.