So we have made it to the final week of our Community Field Experience.  It has been a fantastic experience full of interesting and unusual encounters.  We have spent time in both the Kyuquot elementary/secondary school (KESS) and in the Houpsitas kindergarten.  Both experiences have been informative and fun.  With our time wrapping up at the kindergarten we found we settled into a nice pace of life that included a variety of different activities.  As the weather was nice we made sure to get out and visit the community playground most afternoons.

 

We also began incorporating a lot of free time and play as the year was starting to wrap up and come to an end.  As there was no shortage of games in the kindergarten we got a number of different things going that included making marble towers, indoor slides and working with glitter paintings.

This final week was a farewell to three great weeks in the community and it was hard to say goodbye.  The kids were so much fun every day and  even in the short amount of time they were here had made a very strong impact on our lives.  Each of them was unique and brought their own personality to the classroom.  On our last day we played floor hockey and I made one paper airplane for one of the kids and it quickly snowballed into most of the kids wanting their own plane!  So before you knew it, most the class had different coloured construction paper airplanes.

 

Many things were learned during this experience.  The connection between culture and learning was so strong up here.  The First Nations culture was interwoven into the fabric of the learning in many ways.  I’ve come to see this as such an important part of the learning experience.  I definitely applaud the kindergarten facility for their strong connection with their traditions, from the videos they watched, to the hats made for graduation, to the art created.  Teaching lessons learned included the willingness to be flexible, to be open to different approaches, to look for the new way of approaching a situation.  I hope to be able to carry some of these lessons into my next teaching assignment and am grateful for the time I was able to have up here.  Such a welcome counterpoint to the long practicum!