 We have asked two educators to give us glimpses into practices within their environments. And in that, we're going to start with Corinne Gannon first, who is the principal of early learning for Edmonton Catholic schools. And she will be followed by Barb Reid, who is the executive director of getting ready for inclusion today. And so I'm going to turn the mic over to Corinne to get started. And then we'll take a bit of a break, not long, just enough to change PowerPoints and then we'll bring Barb on. Great. Thank you so much. And it's a pleasure to be here. So I have 15 minutes, so I'm going to talk really quite fast and go quite quickly through some slides, because I also have a few video segments that I want to share. So my purpose here today is to share with you a little bit of our 100 Voices Programming in Edmonton Catholic schools. Now for those of you that don't know, 100 Voices is a pre-kindergarten program for three and four-year-olds. And we began it about five years ago, and prior to that we had three segregated sites for early learning for pre-kindergarten. And they were known as the hand-in-hand programs. And what we learned from those programs is that we certainly honored early intervention and pre-kindergarten from those experiences, but we very much embraced the whole action on inclusion movement. We are a very inclusive school district, and 100 Voices is very, very inclusive. So it's community-based, all children are welcome, and we provide services for all those children and meet the needs whatever those children may have. Five years ago when we began 100 Voices, we had about 54 children registered in those programs, and this year we have over 1,000. So it's certainly a program that is growing and continues to grow. So the philosophy of the 100 Voices program very much focuses on brain research, very much supports action on inclusion, embraces the kindergarten program statement. We are also very regio-inspired. And quite frankly, if you take the elements of regio-inspired philosophy, it very much is in sync with the kindergarten program statement, as well as 21st century skills, which of course supports and comes from action on curriculum. Now I'm going to show you a little video, and this video is from our 100 Voices video series. There's a few of our segments that are actually also posted on our district website, which is ecsd.net. So this particular introduction to 100 Voices, you will also find on the website under Early Learning. So here we go. It's just a little overview. To the wonderful world of early learning. Come on in. We'd like to welcome you to our early learning program, 100 Voices. This is a program in our school for our three and a half to four and a half year old children. It's a program where children lead the way. It's a 21st century learning environment. It explores the child's interest, the natural curiosity, the sense of wonder in an environment where the senses are stimulated and children experience the wonder of opening human potential. Really what we had strived to do was to create something that was completely out of the box. We wanted to envision programming that was unlike other programming that existed for young children. And so we engaged in a process of critical reflection. We had a wonderful opportunity to attend an international study group in Italy. They've evolved programs there over 50 years. And we've taken the programs in Italy as an inspiration for our 100 Voices programs. At first I was struck by the fact that actually this whole child-centered philosophy isn't new. It just reaffirmed how positive this type of philosophy and programming where it could take us all. And it impacted myself and my colleagues so much so that we knew that this was the route that we had to go. This whole notion of kids coming to a box, being all taught the same thing in the same way, expressing themselves in the same way is of the past. 100 Voices program is an early learning program that follows the regio-philosophy, engages in in-depth projects, and allows for learning engagement for all students. It is a program that is based on inquiry, investigation, and discovery. Looking at the child as a protagonist, they are the main character in my classroom. There is a variety of children that enter our classroom. Children with very special needs could be in speech and language, could be their fine motor or gross motor skills. And it could be children who are just ready to come and make friends and socialize and grow emotionally and socially. So there's a wide gamut of children and they all need each other and learn from each other. I think 100 Voices is the foundation piece of our school. It's the starting point for our children. They come in very young. They have their mums and dads with them. And I think when we welcome our youngest children, we welcome their families. The main thing I think 100 Voices is, is children learning from children. It's really looking at the teacher and the child as a researcher and giving them the skills to reflect on their learning so that they can continue to learn in a world that really is not yet defined for all the years to come. I've mentioned briefly how regio-inspired philosophy is very much in sync with 21st century learning. So what you would see in a 100 Voices program is certainly inquiry, creativity, documentation, which also weaves in assessment in multiple ways. Partnerships with our communities, family involvement is a huge component. Environments, which we talked about earlier this morning, high quality environments are critical. And 100 Voices comes from, it's inspired through the 100 languages. And that's multiple ways that children can express themselves and multiple ways that they learn and multiple interests. So very much personalized learning. And this is from Laurie Malaguzzi, who was the founder of Regio. And he just speaks to what those 100 languages are. And he also speaks to how schools and the traditional way of programming very much rob children and how we can be very detrimental to kids' learning if we don't do it in the right way. So we have taken to heart the learnings of the brain and are always hungry to learn more pieces. And very much the brain research that we hear about and that we learn from our experts do very much influence how we program. And one of my favorite pieces is, you know, I'm really quite anti all those IQ tests and labeling of children and putting children in boxes. And brain research is really supporting the notion that the brain can change and the brain can grow in different ways from a learning perspective. So we definitely don't want to put kids with a particular label and keep them there because that can also very much influence how we work with kids and what we expect of them. We can grow smarter and teachers don't like to hear this but we do remind them that with poor quality environments we can actually damage a child. And, you know, I remind all of the administrators in our district and this is where early learning can be very influential. You know, when we talk about programming and philosophy and early learning when we talk about brain research, it's not just for our children who are three to five to six years old. It very much influences all of the grades. So we are always telling our early learning teachers that in many ways you are curriculum leaders in your schools. You are leaders on inclusion and you are leaders on curriculum. We have been very fortunate in early learning in our kindergarten programs to be part of a pilot called the I which is early years evaluation tool that we use. And it's a screening tool that really makes teachers very proactive in identifying needs with kids that can trigger funding rather than spending months and months and months of our therapist's time in assessing and diagnosing children so that we can put services in place. Rather, we have been most fortunate to be able to look at it proactively, identify needs but not necessarily diagnose and put services and supports and create high quality environments for all children in an inclusive way with our program. So we certainly hope that that kind of a pilot can continue because it has been instrumental as far as making a difference in the inclusive classroom with providing services at the very beginning rather than that whole traditional notion of assessing and stereotyping kids. Very negative. So all of our programs very child centered. Very much teacher as facilitator. We certainly don't advocate for kids sitting on the carpet for 20 to 30 minutes and doing worksheets all in the spirit of getting ready for grade one. We celebrate our faith, of course, being a Catholic district. Power of environment is critical. Bringing in natural materials and living things and actually going outside as well as part of the program. Designing provocations which is critical questioning, critical thinking and also really looking at the teacher and the child as researcher. We've had all kinds of funds recently with iPads. We're not only are we seeing how they're an invaluable assistive tech tool but also how they're an invaluable tool for both the teacher and the child as a tool for research and documentation. So easy to get language samples and for kids to video each other and record each other and play back and see themselves how they're learning and growing. So it's a very powerful tool. Being involved in in-depth projects and investigations and really listening to what the children's interests are and where they want to go. And of course being very language rich and creating meaningful opportunities to communicate. Observation and documentation, of course, very important. And celebrating culture and family. Over half of our children in our 100 Voices programs are ELL children who are ELL. And of course action on inclusion, very instrumental with what we have been doing in early learning. We have as part of our multi-disciplinary team, speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, family school liaison workers, behavior specialists, psychologists, fine art specialists, and of course our early learning consultants who are here today. We very much use the model, a pyramid of intervention where we're looking at broad-based supports, meeting the needs of all kids, that's very much universal designs for learning as well. And then of course as children need it based on their needs and their programming, small group and individual programming. We have been very fortunate to have created some broad-based strategies as well with our multi-disciplinary team, which I'll talk a little bit more about later. This is a video that captures a little bit about what our multi-disciplinary team does in classrooms. And we're going to see if it works. I'm going to do a little bit of risk-taking here. Must have got it from my father, I guess. I have my fancy hat on and my fancy scarf, my sunglasses, and check out my fancy purse. We have fabulous support in the classroom. We have a speech language pathologist that helps to guide us in how we can best help the children who are having struggles with certain particular aspects of speech, whether it's their receptive expressive language or even articulation of sounds. I'm going to drink fancy with my little finger up from a teacup. Oh, darling, it's so much better. They'll work with the class, so they're learning already now what can I do in terms of speech to infuse it into the philosophy or the projects that you're doing. We have an occupational therapist who comes in and she does amazing stuff with the children. Gives us, both her and the speech pathologist, gives us resources of how we can incorporate those skills that she's been teaching us into our lessons. So not only is it just a lesson that they come in and work with the students or the students that actually need the support, but it benefits all the students. We have behavior specialists that come in that help us with certain situations with children that we might need some guidance with. Who can meow like a cat? We also have adaptive physical education consultant and she shows us all of the fun, gross motor movements and fine motor movements as well with the children. Provides us a wealth of ideas of games and various opportunities for the children to live actively. Right, what are we going to do today? I wonder. And use our... I love it. We are going to use our imaginations. In terms of fine arts, we have Heidi who comes in with art. Amazing has inspired me in so many ways just in terms of getting away from craft and going into creation. You can talk inside. Can you hear me? And I can see you. And that's a huge part because a lot of times I find that the students, when I ask them to create, it's almost like they don't know how they're like, are you sure I can do this? What are the steps? And giving them that ability of being, go ahead, you can create something with these materials. What do you think? Once again, deeper level thinking. So our speech and language pathologists regularly visit our classrooms. As do our occupational therapists and the other specialists on staff. And one of the pieces that we have really zoomed in on is broad based strategies. And those are strategies that come from each discipline that very much meet the needs of particular children that might have particular challenges in any of those areas. But they're also just absolutely excellent strategies for any child. And this was actually a short-term objective in setting the direction. And we're pleased to have more or less completed these strategies, although they'll always be revised and continue to evolve. But we're fortunate to have established a partnership with ERLC where these broad based strategies will be posted on their website, along with some video segments that show them actually being modeled in the classroom. So that will soon be coming out. And one of the key pieces of those broad based strategies are really building capacity with the classroom teacher. Our therapists really, we do really try to have them look at the classroom teacher as their first client. Because it is really through the classroom teacher that those strategies and the different strategies that that child needs for their programming will be incorporated into their program every day throughout the day, both at school and at home. So it's really building capacity with teacher and parents and educational assistance. As well as, of course, modeling and working with kids in the classroom. So we look at fine motor skills, gross motor skills. We have many pieces of resources that inspire children to actively move in the classroom, as well as outside, of course. We've been having lots of fun lately with our behavior specialists. They've been teaming up with our occupational therapists. And that whole world of sensory is really becoming that much more actualized in the classroom, as far as having a significant impact on children, particularly with behavior challenges. We've also been doing lots of professional development with our educational assistants as well. And we've created a new role in our 100 voices program that we're quite excited about. It's called an early learning facilitator. We have a certified teacher in all of our programs. And many of our programs also have an educational assistant. But all of our programs now starting this year also have an early learning facilitator. And that's a person who is a partner with the classroom teacher. They're not a certified teacher, but they have at least a minimum of a two-year early childhood diploma, along with some experience working with young children. And we're finding that support person together with the teacher is increasing the quality of programming that much more. So we're very, very excited about that piece. And look forward to Grant McEwen continuing to graduate those people who have those early childhood diplomas. We're also constantly challenging ourselves to diversify our team. And we are finding that, you know, and it's that whole personalization of learning, is that kids have different interests and different things work for different kids. Fine arts is a wonderful way that kids are expressing themselves and that we can inspire children. So we've brought on board to our multidisciplinary team, a down specialist. We piloted it last year and have now brought that person on full-time this year. We have a fine arts specialist who you saw in the multidisciplinary video and an environmental specialist that we've also added on this year to help the consultants with their work in classrooms. Now this is a little segment and it doesn't really do justice to some of the work that our therapists are doing. We're constantly challenging ourselves to find new and innovative ways. I mentioned briefly before iPads. We are finding iPads. Press that button a little too fast. Hi everyone and welcome to this video that will hopefully demonstrate just a few of the ways that the iPad is impacting the speech and language skills of our early learners here at Edmonton Catholic. As we strive to support all children with broad-based inclusive speech and language strategies, our practice has naturally moved us into the classroom learning environment. The iPad is such an engaging tool for so many learners. In this clip, I'm working with two children. The one on the left is an English language learner, and the one on the right is working on pronouncing her S sounds more clearly. Remember how we said that last time? Oh, I love you. Even in this noisy, distracting center-time classroom, the iPad keeps them so engaged and focused. They successfully learn the words to talk about what they're doing. All of our therapists do all of their intervention inclusively right in the class. We forbid pullout. It's very much based on the functional context. With iPads, we have found children who have autism responding very positively. We have found children who have been mute in the classroom, having wonderful conversations with the iPad and with Talking Tom, and so on. We are really finding that as another way that we can get children to respond and grow. I've talked a little bit about universal designs for learning. The power of play is a very integral part of our programs as well. Love the book by Stuart Brown that talks about play personalities. He also talks about play being a fertilizer for brain growth. We certainly don't want our behavior to become fixed, as we learned this morning. We have many family programs in our early learning. Last year we had over 10,000 people participate in our family program, so that's parent and child together in different learning opportunities. All of which our multidisciplinary staff are a part of. We do programming at school that's outside of the instructional time, as well as in different facilities around the city. City of Edmonton is a big partner of ours. Final thoughts, my time is running out. This particular video segment is not on our website, but the other two that I shared, the first one that I tried to share, you can certainly take a look at. Once again, that's on ecsd.net. There's another segment on that early learning site that involves multiculturalism. And these are some final thoughts from some of our people in the classrooms. When I first started education, I thought children were children. They play, they enjoy, they laugh, but I didn't know how deep they can actually think. And I think the 100 Voices program gives them that credibility. 100 Voices, I find, I can really go with the children and explore their curiosity. We do have a curriculum in the back of mind. We're not just going whichever way we want to. We do have a purpose in mind with what we're doing. The philosophy of this school is 21st century learning. And a lot of people will look at that and say, oh, it's technology. But it's really not, because right now we're preparing them to be the citizens of tomorrow. Tomorrow's going to look very different than our world today. As the 100 Voices program began to impact in terms of the visible presence, the hands-on project-based work, the documentation, all of the dimensions of the program, I think emptied into the corridors and now in the halls and throughout the school. It's really showing the teachers in other grades what learner engagement looks like through the lens of a very young child. And it's something we want to see happening through all of the grades in our school. It's about inquiry, it's about curiosity, it's about wonder. It's hard to imagine that they're only four years old when they exit my doors. I would not want to be doing anything different. I come to work every morning with a smile on my face. This is the best place to be in the world. As a job, I don't consider this my job, I consider it part of my lifestyle.