 I'll give you some context. I'm the principal of the Early Education and Family Wellness Centre in Witaskwan, which is part of Witaskwan Regional Public School System. And we offer a play-based preschool experience to children with identified delays and disabilities, but also we have that mix of typically developing children, peers who benefit from the program as well. Generally the children are in our program for two years, and then they transition to their neighborhood kindergartens and then into their grade one program with their same age peers. The team of professionals who provide the services and supports at the Early Education Centre also work in the home with the families supporting them to become stronger advocates and better understand the needs of their child. And then we also follow them into kindergarten to provide that consistency of support. So, no one strategy makes a program as we've all seen. There are many factors involved and it's the way that everything fits together, hence the title, putting it all together, that makes the program be the best it can be. We've heard from many people today and there are strong similarities with Early Education programs around Alberta. I believe that we all learn from each other and I'm happy to be able to share just some small part of that. And since time goes quickly, apparently, I will move quickly. So I'm going to start with our philosophy and several years back, we adopted a statement believing, behaving, becoming. And I want to credit that to a gentleman named Lyle Lorenz that some of you may have encountered in your leadership training. He was meaning it in the context of leadership and providing leadership, but we really embraced it because it spoke to us and we really do live it and believe it. So I'll just explain it a little bit more so that you understand kind of where our thought process was. We truly believe that all children can learn and our actions, the way that we behave in planning and implementing the learning environment, set the stage for children to behave as learners. So I'm not using behave in the context of be good. I'm using it in the context of act like a learner and involved learner in creating their own experiences. So they are learners with choice and opportunity to explore and interact with their peers. Our collaborative planning and our teamwork contribute to the children becoming successful learners. Our philosophy also embraces the belief that inclusion is the norm. Inclusion has many multiple meanings as several speakers have mentioned today and it's important for every aspect of the child's life, not just where they're sitting in the classroom or which classroom they're sitting in. So we look at family inclusion. A lot of our families come to us and let us know that they have difficulty functioning as a family in the community. They can't go grocery shopping. They're often excluded from family celebrations and dinners because their child doesn't know how to behave or they can't control their child. So that's a big problem for them. They need to be part of all of those aspects of their life. School inclusion is the obvious one in the classroom, on the playground, throughout the school day and school year. And social inclusion is a really big piece of the puzzle. That inclusion with their peers so that when they go play soccer in their community or when they meet up with friends at a swimming pool that they're still considered to be part of that peer group. Very quickly I just identified a few areas of research that we've sort of done some really good reading and trying to understand. So in the areas of brain development, several people there and of course I'm happy to add our speakers from today on to that list as well. Early learning strategies, we look back at some people that I've listed there. Family engagement, Joyce Epstein is the guru in that and that's certainly where we started but that's not exclusive. There's lots of research on family engagement and I think Barb covered a lot of that earlier so that's very helpful as well. And then of course just good teaching strategies and that's something that's ongoing throughout. Our program offers many different options. We have a full or hard time attendance choice. We offer a morning or an afternoon choice. Some of our families choose a home base program oftentimes for that first year when they're really really not ready to let their two and a half or three year old leave the nest. So we accommodate that and that can look really different depending on where they live and depending on the family dynamic. I should probably give you the context that our jurisdiction is very wide across the province so we go all the way west to Alder Flats which is Drayton Valley Rocky Mountain House area and we go east to Gwynne so we have a lot of families that are fairly isolated in terms of what resources they can access easily so home base programming is often the only option at least to get started. We often do a blend of that center-based and home base so families that are kind of ready to let their little baby leave and still kind of want to have that piece where they're at home as well or sometimes it's a medical reason if there's a medically fragile child they maybe can't attend the program as frequently as they'd like. We certainly don't want them to lose the opportunity to have that programming. Of course family oriented program visits are part of what we do but it's up to the family to decide how many and how frequently and what those look like and we offer our outreach supports in the kindergarten. Typically in a kindergarten class there might be one, two or three puff children sometimes as many as nine so it looks a little bit different than it does in a center-based program where the majority of the children are there with delays and disabilities but what we try to do is put those strategies and supports in place just as many of you have already said that are good for all kids. And of course even more importantly we offer flexibility of choice and we still offer consistency as well because it's that mix of a structure but with choice and flexibility within the structure. Our program has been constantly evolving throughout the year as children grow and develop but even year to year because every year it's a new group of families, a new group of children with new challenges so we can't have one set program. It needs to adjust and bend for the needs of that group. We get our input from many disciplines and consultants but our support teams of speech and language, occupational therapy, physical therapy, psychology, behavior consultant whatever mix of people we have they're all part of that team and often times if you're looking into our classroom you would be very hard pressed to identify who's the teacher and do you have any teaching assistants in this room because I can't figure out who's who which we think is a good thing. We are always free to try something new, take a risk, adjust, expand, change whatever needs to happen. The structure of the program remains consistent with the philosophy but it can look very different day to day and year to year. Believing is about relationship building so we believe all children can learn but we need to begin where the family is and we need to consider that each family is unique and has different needs. We listen and we try to understand those needs right from the beginning. That's the foundation for our future relationship. Based on that we focus on what we can offer. We don't say oh I'm sorry we can't do that. We talk about okay we've heard what your struggles are and what your challenges are. Here's what we can do and that's our starting place. Knowing that they have a choice is often very reassuring to families because they feel that they still have some control and then we're not doing something to them or to their child we're doing things with them. Families are a very important part of our team as all of you have also identified they're important to your teams. We work together and plan for success and our common desire, common desire is to do what's best for the child. Another part of believing is team building. Building the team is more than hiring qualified people to fill a specific role. Our foundational principles of the program are clearly communicated right from the start and it's about attracting and choosing people who are the right fit. They share that same philosophy but they also contribute something different. Each person on the team regardless of their role and responsibility provides something unique to that team and we all learn from each other during our collaborative time, during family conferences as well as working together side by side in the classroom. The team becomes stronger because of this. We believe that building routines is part of helping those children behave as learners. All children do better when their routine is structured and predictable. We know this. The goal is to have interventions happen in the most natural environment. And when it makes sense to provide teaching or practice of a skill outside of the classroom, that could be an option as well. Sometimes one child with one adult, sometimes an adult with a child and a play partner, or sometimes in smaller groups with one or two adults and eight or nine children. We're looking at the kindergarten program statement as the foundation that we're working towards building. We break down the skills and the learner outcomes and we help the children become ready to learn when they get to formal school, which in our world is grade one. We focus on the foundational skills the child will need to be successful both in kindergarten and beyond. Another part of behaving is the collaborative time. So we have consistent and frequent collaboration of all our team members including parents as a priority. This allows our team to focus on strategies that work but always looking to challenge the child to master new skills. The learning activities as well as the routines of the day are deliberate and intentional and all members of the team know this and look for those opportunities within the routines and throughout the day to introduce new skills and practice emerging skills. Our record keeping of progress is ongoing and frequent and everyone contributes. There's lots of eyes and ears that are observing and our collaborative time allows us to share the different views of every child and reflect on what the next goal should be. Transitional planning is a very important part of becoming successful as a learner but we believe that transition is not an end result. We begin right away because the child transitions from their home environment into the choice of their program. Throughout the year families and team members review together what the next step should be and adjustments can be made as necessary. Options for that next step, next transition are provided and the appropriate people are included. So when we're transitioning a child into a new kindergarten program the receiving teacher is invited to attend that meeting to discuss where the child was where they are now and where they're going. Families often are struggling with a new diagnosis or they just don't know how to manage the challenging behaviors that some of their children have. We ask families what they've already tried and we offer to model new strategies and help them to evaluate whether or not those new strategies work. Building the family's confidence and knowledge strengthens their family life as well as prepares them to continue to advocate to have their child's needs met in other activities and grades. Our program offers many other experiences just as many of you have shared today. We do the seeds of empathy program where we bring in babies, real live babies and watch them grow throughout the year. Our kids love it and we see real carry over into the home. We're having a little mini baby boom in our program and it seems like every mom is coming in pregnant and leaving with a new baby so it's been very helpful I think for them as well. We offer a variety of cultural experiences. We bring visitors into the program, have special events and near the end of the year field trips. We also focus on the Triple P parenting program and work specifically with some families who are asking for that specific support in their home and we offer other parent workshops that are based on the needs that parents have identified. We see a lot of commonality if one person's having trouble with toileting or eating we probably have eight or ten families that are struggling with that as well. Parents and guardians are offered multiple experiences to enhance their knowledge and skills and this makes them stronger advocates for their child. Evidence of success is kind of nebulous and we've struggled with it a lot. I've accessed Barb's survey to try and help us get some clear data on it but generally speaking we work with a lot of anecdotal kinds of records and people giving us comments. We've seen an increase in our enrollment year to year. We're in year 10 now and we're up to 60 children. We started and we had barely 20 so I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing because it means there's lots of kids that we're identifying but I think it's an awareness in the community that there's help and programming available so we're identifying these kids before they get into the school system which is a benefit to everyone. Our community placements are limited to match the ratio that Alberta Education is looking for and we actually have a waitlist as early as December of the current school year for the next year. People very anxious to get their child in. We get a lot of referrals from our community partners. They see that we're doing good things for kids and the parents are expressing their excitement with receiving the support and the parent feedback is very good. I just wanted to share in closing a couple of statements. I asked our staff when I knew I was doing this I said tell me what is the best feature of our program because I can look at it but everybody has a different a different view and these are some statements. One of our teaching assistants made the statement that having a team effort makes a stronger 17 times over and I heard that earlier today that we learned from each other so I am not a speech and language pathologist but when you sit and play beside a speech and language pathologist as they're playing with children you pick up a few things so then you're better able to be more responsive to a child's needs in that area. Our speech and language pathologist made a really great statement. Each student here has a long line of people who have got their back and it's that sort of feeling that these are our kids, our as a collective and we all want them to succeed and we're there to help support them to do that and our occupational therapist made the statement about we're good at thinking outside the box but even more importantly we're we're good at being flexible when the child can't be and that's important to know because the child can't fit himself into what we expect but we can certainly adjust our expectations and our strategies to help. The parent feedback is even more important to us and I could have probably done about 10 slides easily but I didn't. One mom this just before Christmas made the statement that the grandparents came to visit and they couldn't believe the difference in the child just in terms of understanding the speech and language and the fact that he no longer screamed at the top of his lungs and stood on top of the table when it was meal time. So those were exciting changes that they observed in a very what they perceived to be a very short time. We have a parent networking opportunity for specifically for parents whose children have been diagnosed with autism because we've had a real increase in that in our community and it was actually parents who used to be in our program came to us and said can you facilitate this. We wanted to be a parent led group but can you give us a space and can you just help us sort of come together and we gladly did that and the alumni parent can made a statement at about the third or fourth month that they met to another group of new parents that you'll never feel more loved than you do here. So families come to us and recognize that we're there for them and we're supporting them and we truly do love them and their children. And then the one that really gets to me is when a mom was so excited because her little girl came home with a birthday invitation and it was the very first time she had ever been invited to a birthday party party including family birthday parties and the fact that the the mom of this birthday child said oh yeah for sure we want her to come it just it broke my heart and she was so so excited about it. So in closing I just wanted to share the recipe for success and I guess the key point is that inclusion is a process of putting together all the right pieces for the program the family and most importantly the child. The recipe for success is not a consistent one we're constantly adjusting adding deleting ingredients and then reviewing the results and hope it tastes good. One of the key components is the collaboration time to review and revise the program and interventions for each child. While there's structure and predictability framing the program there's room for individual choice and flexibility to meet the needs of each child and family as those needs change. To be responsive to those needs we need to continually evolve. Another key component is building a relationship of respect and trust with each family and a belief that all children can learn and having that philosophy that inclusion is the norm provides that solid foundation for the relationship. Looking at new and current research working together as a team taking chances to try new strategies are all part of what we do in our practice but inclusion is a mindset it's a philosophy and it it's that it is that belief that drives us to behave in ways which ensure that our children become the very best they can be. Thank you for the opportunity to share our ideas about best practices around inclusion in the early years in our program in our community and I want to thank all of the presenters today because and the participants for the opportunity to to share and discuss the richness of programming that's happening here in Alberta. We have actually had families register with us from as far away as Ontario and British Columbia then Saskatchewan and a few other spread out places and they purposely moved to Alberta because they had heard of the good things that are happening for kids in inclusion. I think that's a real bonus to us and I feel very very fortunate to be one very small part of that. Thank you.