North Spirit Lake's land based education and community development strategy
North Spirit Lake School News -from the principal
Children and community come together to build a better education and community for the children.
The children and community members have been immersed in model of education that is more a kin to their well being than current educational models
Land based education is key to regaining and retaining all of our traditional values ... our hopes and dreams are connected to the land.
This type of education foster critcal thinking and creativity though patterns, thereby exercising the most important organ in the body, the brain.
For our students, it re-connects everyone back to our values of caring, kindness, love, bravery, courage.
For the Teachers and Teacher's Assistants, it gives them a chance to see children exercise strengths and then more importantly capitialize on these strengths through the integration of the regular school program.
Chief Sally Bunting/Kakegamic states "that our schools are for our children and they must be given the opportunity to succeed on their terms". This learning and teaching model reaches our community and students with great success.
This type of educational model cannot operate without the community from all levels, from day care children to our elders. Therefore all of the commnity is involved in the process as demostrated in the past few weeks.
Every Friday is planned to close out with community based activities set on the land. Planning is essential and the school and community has to resource the activities. Many of the resources to make the program fluid come existing Welfare, Health or Recreation program, thereby creating community success.
As an example, recently the children and parents set nets through the ice and collected the fish. This activity was resourced by the Health program, it integrated the Language and values into the day's activities and then everyone had a big community feast.
Extensions of this is making community crafts at the school on Wednesday evening, where all the community comes to make crafts such a key chains, more importantly the community comes to the school to share and talk about thier stories.
The new principal, Mr. Conrad Bobiwash is one part of the process, as a helper and leader. He comes from Blind River, Ontario near Sault Ste Marie. He has initiated and led child based and community based programming across North America.
This process is very close to our way of learning and is very natural, thereby fostering individual change and excellence in education.More importantly, this model teaches all our children and community about the value of education.