 It's an honor to come and have an opportunity to speak with many of you across the province and it was tough to decide what topic to choose to discuss. And I chose one that's near and dear to the heart of the grit program and that is the role of engaging families. And we know that in early learning we have a small window of opportunity to tap into the strengths of families and their skills and confidence to not only guide inclusion in the early years but to guide inclusion of their children with special needs over their lifetime. So I'm going to just talk as fast as Karine spoke because oops, now I don't know where to advance. Got it. So 15 minutes at a glance, this gives me about 4 minutes and 20 seconds on each topic. So quickly just looking at the role of families in early learning how do we as early childhood educators and service providers strengthen family skills and confidence? And something unique to grit is our parent vision statement and I'd like to talk a little bit about the influence of a parent's vision in terms of guiding inclusion over the long term of their child's life and linking quality inclusion and family wellness very, very quickly. So this is an image that was drawn by one of our families, alumni families looking back at their experience and family's journey towards inclusion and she has so carefully crafted an image that at the center is the heart of the child and the family with the people that Brian and Robin were talking about is the critical people supporting that child and family to be strong and to be healthy and to be resilient with the challenges that they might be facing and the opportunities that are there to create community and the links and programs and services that are in the family's community that become part of their circle of support. So when we look at inclusion in the early years we don't look at it as a setting in the community. We look at inclusion in a family's home. Many families tell us their children don't have dinner with them. They don't sit at the family table. Their siblings don't know how to play together. So we're starting to help families understand their value of inclusion and what that means right in their family first and the early years are the only opportunity we have to help families understand inclusion and what it means from a greater context outside of a classroom setting. And then we look at inclusion in the community and Karine talked about the quality inclusive child care programs that are out there. We also partner a lot with the swimming pools, the library programs, drop-in centers so that inclusion becomes embraced in the greater community and then transitioning to school of course. So this photo again just reminds us of, I think it was Brian who talked about relations, maybe it was Robin, I'll call him the team. Relationships matter and there's differences in the relationships that families have. A lot of our work around families has been grounded in the research of family-centered practice and we spent probably five years as an organization trying to understand what does this mean. A lot of us say we're family-centered, we said we are family-centered before we even understood what it meant. So it was helpful to take away three primary things from our work on family-centered practice and one is that it's a process, it's a lengthy process of understanding how our behaviors and actions as professionals really do guide and influence outcomes for families. And when we think of where we want families to be three years on the outside of our early childhood program, we want families to be strong and resilient. We want them to know what we know about child development, about brain research, we've joked a lot about if I could go back and parent differently, how many of us would go back and parent differently with the knowledge we have today. So how do we take our role to help families know what we know in a way that they can join and walk with us on this learning journey? So under the foundation of family-centered practice, very quickly, three critical steps, we have to identify what we believe and value about families. And I can't count how many times I've heard if families would just, if the mother would, if they would stop doing. And we come with our judgments and our own ideas of what families should do, and we need to be aware of our own cultural backgrounds, our own family beliefs and values of what we bring to our work with families. And we need to, you know, Carl Dunst used the word professionals' behaviors, and often people said behaviors, that's kind of a harsh word, but it is our behaviors. It's our actions and decisions and conversations at every level that we engage in. And so everything we do, either enhances or diminishes family capacity and strengthening. And that's something that we keep revisiting in terms of our decisions and the processes that we use. Relationships are key, of course. Families need to know that they are trusted. We understand their journey. We have empathy for their experience. And once we have relationship, then we can guide families into more steps of participation. So the what ifs and why doesn't the parent do that often falls on first that we have not yet built relationship. And that relationship takes time, and only through that will we move families to higher levels of participation. So strengthening parents' skills and confidence, we've started adding family learning goals onto our individual program plans. It was something that we did last year, and it's struggled us in some ways, but we choose one or two family goals. And for families, things that they might choose is understanding the child development, maybe understanding their child's diagnosis, accessing community resources. And some of those things might fall under your family-orientated sessions, but we try to help families look at the goals that they may not yet know are coming on the horizon. So when we look at action on inclusion then we say how do we engage parents as active members of a learning team? We know that there's other priorities that we would like them to know. We want them to be effective communicators with professionals. We want them to advocate. We want them to have a vision for their child. But we also want them to know the importance of some of the brain research that we're learning more and more about responsiveness and interactions and those early skills that when they have a child with a disability they don't even remember how they parented other children or what is the difference in parenting or is it the same and recognizing what worked before. So how we do that, we do a lot of home visits. The GRID program is unique in that we're almost a reverse puff program in that 85% of the children who are in our program have been diagnosed at birth. They're not diagnosed in kindergarten they're looking at supporting children in our teams who have lifelong developmental disabilities and we use home visits to strengthen families' natural routines to look at play opportunities where parents can recognize their role in strengthening their child's development and really using a coaching model with families and that's been a huge learning curve for us. Moving from having relationships with families to a role of where traditionally home visits might have been on a consultation or expert model to one of coaching where we do joint planning with families and we really are looking at the strengths and building on what's going well and where families are already confident. We've also have a Looking Ahead resource which guides families through three years of early childhood. Families tell us that every year is a transition. Some families can't imagine their child leaving the home environment and going into a community preschool program. Once they get to the preschool they can't imagine kindergarten and once they get to kindergarten they certainly can't always imagine what their vision for inclusion looks like for grade one and beyond. So we have a lovely resource that guides families through the three years of early childhood and beyond. Another thing in our process is really honoring families' journeys. We offer a parent-to-parent support group where parents come usually three Mondays a month and learn and share and grow together learn how to navigate the system look at some of their learnings around advocacy facing the barriers and emotions to what are the barriers for inclusion and there are many. There's early childhood policies in some of our community programs that are barriers to inclusion. Families can't access their first play school of choice sometimes as they might have with their previous children. So we need to look at all of those barriers as families begin to travel on that journey. And we need to understand the stress on families and the fatigue employment issues families with children who have a developmental disability lifelong have more stress than we can imagine. The research is clear on the level of stress and we know the level of stress on the impact of early parent-child relations. Those supporting families on those journeys are important. The vision statement is again a tough thing for families to imagine. Families live in the day to day so when we ask them to imagine two years down the road or three years down the road for their child it is difficult. And as we try to inspire inclusive futures for young families this is a quote that I've often shared if you don't know where you're going you will likely end up someplace else and there will be many people lining up to tell parents where to go and what to get and how they should plan for their child's future. And we chuckle but we do it. We tell families what we know and so part of the family journey is helping families uncover their values and their beliefs and whatever they are it's right for that family to take a different path. So a vision statement we do this in usually a five-hour workshop with families on a Saturday and it helps families look at their family values look at their child's life within their family community and where their siblings are and it's actually a process of engaging families to move from their head of what they're thinking to the heart of what they want of their family and putting it on paper and by putting it on paper they set that intention of a positive future for their child that they can share with their early childhood team they can share it with the community and the big step is sharing it with their school principals and when they do it just opens up doors for communication it opens up doors to define inclusion from the perspective of the family and it opens up doors to understand the role of parents and professionals on a team together and understanding what that individual experience of inclusion might look like for the child in that setting. Outcomes for families are pretty well documented when families do experience a process of family-centered practice. I mentioned earlier that we often say we're family-centered and grit was one of those programs that said of course we're family-centered until the research literature says you can tell you if you're family-centered. So we went back and we went and developed a survey asking some really critical questions that we said we wanted families to be able to evaluate our effectiveness in setting them up as long-term advocates and supports for their family and that was another piece of our learning journey around measuring where can we continue to strengthen and build our relationships of families in the future. One of the slides that I didn't put on was regarding parent-child interactions and one of our speech-language pathologists developed a program called Parent Power and in addition to our home visits it's a six-week program where parents, children and staff come together to build those parent-child interactions in a practice facilitated coaching environment over a six-week period and it's been phenomenal in terms of helping parents connect with their children who are otherwise hard to connect with to be able to read their communication cues to be able to develop a bond around touch around play around shared interests and help families really feel confident in those parent-child interaction skills and I remember one father said to me if I knew how to embed a video Corrine I might have tried how to do that so I'm going to try to paraphrase him and he went through we've had fathers come through parents we've had grandparents come through the parent power program but this one father said you can read on the internet and books forever but you see it and you do it and you practice and you will know it forever and this father was the most articulate dad who's gone through the program English is not his first language and when he actually was able to express that with such eloquence of you see it you do it you practice it you'll know it forever reminded me of what we know for children they see it they hear it they do it it's those hands on experiential learning and for families that learning is the same so I wanted to go back to this lovely picture drawing just to close because I haven't looked at any of my notes that I wrote down but I think I wanted to come back here and close here in in looking at this image of inclusion and it's been helpful for me and I don't know who told me this to think of it as a three-legged stool and on our three legs we need policy and leadership we need family engagement and we need quality early learning and care programs and services and if any one leg is missing then it teeters and we will not have quality inclusion early learning if we take the family out of the equation so it is hard work but we need to continue to find ways to engage families in their natural home environments in their natural learning modes to see their strengths to know that if we're the only program in with that family we don't choose which families we get and there's all kinds of families that come our way but that we actually strengthen families because we only have three years to do it and so once they enter the school system things very quickly shift to the child or the student I should say and we need to help families feel confident to share their vision and to be a continued member of the learning team to guide inclusion and if you look at the research on inclusion it is the vision of families that over decades has driven inclusion to where it is today and we need to continue to work with them and learn from them because we can't do it without them so I'll end with a final reflective quote and I don't have it either with me so I'm paraphrasing but I love it and it was given to me by a parent and it says when you walk to the edge of the cliff of everything you know you need to believe one of two things will happen either you will step on the ground or you will find your wings to fly and we have many parents with wings and many parents who are willing to let us fly with them so I leave those thoughts with you in terms of that critical link of families on that three-legged stool and I hope that your engagement with families continues to be as rich as ours has been so thank you very much she almost needed wings there we're not going to engage in table talk just because our presentations have gone over at this point in time we have a number of questions I'm going to ask our two presenters if they will find their mics right now and they've got them right in front of them and if they could start with the questions and Barb and Corinne I'm going to ask I know we are heavy in the Lethbridge questions from Lethbridge right at this point but if you could as you address the question just say where it's from and we should see some from some other sites come forward and if you could just stagger those that would help us so the first question is how is 100 voices funded and that's from Grand Prairie and the second question talks about the budget so really I'll treat those as the same question the second question was from Lethbridge so 100 voices it's funded through primarily Alberta education it's funded in the same way that a kindergarten program is funded children who are four years of age who can access severe funding or mild moderate funding or ELL funding can access basic grant plus whatever funds happen to go with that special ed component or the ELL funding so that's primarily where our funding comes from for 100 voices we do open up the program though to any child so we do have some typically developing children in the program since pre-kindergarten does not have universal funding which we sure would love to have where's the minister now anyway since we don't currently have universal pre-kindergarten funding we do have a private tuition for families that cannot access the educational grants but that do want to participate in the program we are also very fortunate to have a gentleman who is a private sponsor and actually for six of our communities that are in kind of higher needs areas he pays the basic grant for kids that can't actually access the educational grant we do a mass amount of screening during springtime so parents who are interested in coming into a pre-kindergarten program but aren't sure whether or not their kids actually qualify we do screen using our speech language pathologists and occupational therapists primarily so that's sort of how the budget works as far as the costs of the program there's a certified teacher there's an early learning facilitator there's an educational assistant and of course all the services are from a multidisciplinary team multidisciplinary team runs around $35,000 per class which is a half day then of course you've got your certified teacher which is roughly $45,000 you have your early learning facilitator which is roughly $20,000 and your educational assistant which is roughly the same plus of course classroom resources and paper and paint and everything else so that's it in a real quick nutshell thanks Corinne Barb do you want to take that next question? Sure No Thank you we learned to share well the question is family based programming how do we get parents here and it is from Lethbridge so I'm interpreting the question is how do you get parents out to family based programming and I would say there's three things that we really look at one is parents will only come first to them and it goes back to the consultation versus coaching kind of perspective so if we as the experts say these are great topics come they don't come so we've learned that we need to ask families what they need and what their interests are and ground it in where families are at so that we actually start where families are at the other thing we know and we've learned this in research and actually just you know bite the bullet to do it because the research is pretty clear we need childcare for families to attend we need to remove the other barrier so childcare is a barrier meals are a barrier daytime hours are a barrier so many of our parent groups and workshops are also offered on Saturdays and evenings and when it is daytime we always provide childcare and we always provide a meal so or at least good food so those are some real things that really help but I think the biggest critical thing is that it has to be meaningful to families and in the context of their family life and family experiences hope that helps thank you how can we find out more about the parent power program we've been asked so often and we're very close to probably putting the manual on our website it was funded in partnership through Alberta education through our PAF funding and specialized services through FSCD and Krista Wennerström is our speech language pathologist who developed the content manual and we're in the process of developing a facilitators guide so that anyone can pick it up we've always co-facilitated to build our own capacity so she's been the lead and we've had an occupational therapist early childhood teacher physical therapist or others who co-facilitated to build our capacity across parent power but our hope is to have the manuals available because we just would love it to get out there it's a wonderful resource and we just want to put in some good adult education practice facilitator principles in there to guide others right Barb could you just take the question from Edmonton that's just right below that on the survey and then we'll turn it over to Barb for parents I would be happy to send out our five or six questions that we've developed and you can use it as a tool so you can certainly email me if you would like a copy of it what we did is we went back to the messages that we tell families so when we tell families that they'll feel more skilled and confident in their parent-child interactions they'll feel stronger in advocating for their child's future that they'll be engaged in decision making and making informed decision making so we actually took the five or six questions that Al families will do and we ask those harder questions and we ask them every year so it's been simple in that it's six and it was very insightful in terms of the family's perceptions of their experience and that's been valuable information for us okay Corrine is going to take the last question that comes from I believe Lethbridge yes yes how do you forbid pull out for speech and I'm assuming that speech and language well you know it's been a journey and it is truly a philosophical change back in the old days when I was a classroom teacher that speech path would come knocking on my door and they'd say we need to take Johnny out to do speech and language because he has a severe speech delay and I'd be like great therapist is coming taking the child not my problem so my hands were clean of that I didn't carry over into the classroom no did I really understand what his challenges were as a teacher no did the family no and was it functional based was it educational based no it was very therapeutic so we need to remember that when we're in education our dollars are funded through education so we very much need to focus and emphasize the functional context what are the challenges with language in the classroom which is very important and how are we going to deal with them in the classroom and it's very important that we work with children within the context of what they're living in and where they're at otherwise the carry over really is very very poor so we can learn so much from our specialists from our speech language pathologists from our occupational therapists we do not need to have them pulling children out taking them down the hall to another classroom or the custodian's closet we can't see the work that they do because they have so many gifts to share to develop capacity with the teacher in the classroom and the assistants to model and to work with kids right where they are because that's where the greatest impact will be as far as working with whatever need that child has so that's why we do not permit it there is an exception and that's for children with fluency where we do have a speech therapist a very formal program for those kids that have some real issues with stuttering and so on and that's very much working with the family as well so that would be the exception that comes to mind and that's about it Thank you Corinne and Barb