 I'm going to finish up and then we'll be ready for our lunch break with kind of a five A's that I'd like you to keep track of. And these are them, accept, acknowledge, accommodate, adapt, and advocate. So first off, when we're accepting, you know, we have to be really clear about what is our vision. So our vision is to create an Alberta where every citizen is included, where some citizens don't have different rights than others do. It begins with our work when the children are young. We talk about things like a zero reject policy and naturally occurring proportions. But think about what's in your communications. How do you let people know that you believe in inclusion? What's on your website? What's in your brochures? What information do you give to parents? If parents know when they register their typical child at your program that there may from time to time be children with additional support needs in attendance, there's no surprise. So be really clear about your vision. Talk about this with staff. Talk about this with your board or your management team and get the message out there. Our high quality program supports the needs of all children. We have to be able to acknowledge. We have to acknowledge that sometimes it's hard work. Sometimes we don't know what we're doing. Sometimes we have to ask about how do we fix this environment? At a center I was at, I watched a little girl using a walker standing to the side watching the girls in the dramatic play area. And when I asked the staff about it, I said, so tell me about this little girl. I see she's not really playing. They said to me, oh, she just really likes to watch. And I said, you know, it looks to me like she really, really wants to play. Is there a way for her to be a part of it? And when we looked carefully at the physical space, there were two things we realized. One was the entrance way into the dramatic play area was fairly narrow, more narrow than her walker. So you try to kind of go forward and you get blocked because of the way the little wooden furniture is set up. The second thing was that area was carpeted and she was coming from an area that was not and there was a carpet joiner along the floor. And that carpet joiner that you or I would just step over, this was like a physical barrier for this little child. They needed to make some physical modifications to the space which they did and the next time I was out, I saw that little girl playing there in the dramatic play area. So we have to acknowledge that change is necessary. You need to think about, identify it, break down the barriers, what will we do differently? What kind of accommodation do we need to do? It's not a quick fix. It's going to take time. We have to figure out what our various staff roles are. We have to build partnerships with people from health and education and all the other sectors, those physical changes that might need to be made and what kind of teaching aids and by this I don't mean the person but like what do we need to develop in the way of play materials or learning tools and all of that is going to take some time too. So it's hard sometimes to find the time in our busy day. We have to carve that out. We have to be willing to adapt. We can't say, well, we've always done it this way. Sometimes people think that when you include children with special needs it means they do everything the same as the other kids and no change is required. It's the opposite. You have to look at what your program is all about and think consciously about what changes do I need to make? What does my role need to be? What can the children do? What needs to happen? Are we acknowledging each child's personhood and valuing that person? We have to continue to advocate. I keep coming back to this one. You know, you're in the army now. We have to all be advocates for inclusion. We have to have that attitude that truly celebrates all kids. We have to practice an anti-bias approach every single day. And who benefits when we do that? Everybody benefits. I want to tell you about this little girl, Danielle, sitting on the chair in the middle of her circle group. Her mom looked for over two years in Fredericton, New Brunswick before she found a center willing to accept her daughter. The CBC actually did a story about her when she finally found care for her daughter. There were lots of centers in that community that were not practicing zero reject. There were lots of programs that said we can't because, and they have lots of reasons why not. When they asked Denise Cormier, Danielle's mom, what was it like for you when you found a program willing to accept your daughter? Mom said it was like coming home. That's what we need for all children in Canada. A place that really feels like home. A place that encourages continuity. That is responsive to real family need and real child need. Kind of like cheers, you know, the place where when you come and everybody says, Norm, you know, like we welcome you in this program. And that's what Danielle's mom experienced firsthand and her little daughter was the beneficiary of that. So I want to give you all an A plus for your attitude. Positive, positive attitude, please spread it around. This is something you do want to spread. Don't be shy. Pass it on to everyone you can. Be ready to celebrate all the wonderful things that should be celebrated in the day to day work that you do. And I want to just quickly tell you one more story if you're not going to starve to death on me. If you don't know what to do, look to the children. Children can be our teachers. Remember I told you how I used to work at this therapeutic play program at the children's hospital? And one day we had a referral of a child to our program who was definitely the most significantly affected child I've ever seen. A little guy by the name of Roger. He'd been hit by a car playing outside unsupervised. He had had a lot of brain damage. He was paralyzed from the neck down. In the moments that he was without oxygen, he had a lot of brain damage. When he recovered from that, he forgot how to speak. And physically, he was unable to move. His mom, who had several other young children, and she was a single parent, gave him up to the Child Welfare Authority, and he was living in Children's Hospital because they could not find a medical foster care placement that could accommodate this little boy. He wasn't sick. This was going to be the rest of his life. And the nurses got quite concerned about him, like he was depressed. He was only a little preschooler in a room where kids come and kids go from Children's Hospital and he stayed. So one day they asked, could Roger come to our nursery school? And we were located on the second floor. And we said, of course. But I want to tell you that the day Roger came to nursery school, my heart sunk. Roger was velcroed to a board. He eventually did get a little wheelchair. But at the beginning, he came down on a board with a ventilator plugged into a little oxygen tank that came along behind him. It looked like R2D2 coming behind him. And a nurse, in case there'd be a code blue while he was with us, fortunately, that didn't ever happen. Roger came through the doors, grinning from ear to ear. You would have think he was the happiest kid in the world to come to play school. And the children were so interested in Roger, like he had so much equipment for one thing. And they asked all those questions that grown-ups never want to ask, like, where do you sleep? And how do you pee? And Roger was very motivated by the other kids. We, as teachers, had a lot of adapting to do. Like, what do you do with a child? They can't move from their neck down. So we did a lot of blowing bubbles, because that was something Roger could do. We blew bubbles in our chocolate milk, something our mothers told us never to do. But we all did it there. We blew soap bubbles. We learned to paint with our mouths. Roger loved circle time. That was a wonderful experience for him. But this was a group of three-year-olds. And mostly what the three-year-olds wanted to do that winter was jump. Remember I told you there was like this little wooden play structure in the middle of the room, the one that Jamie was throwing kids off of? The game really was you would climb up onto that wooden play structure. Oh, wait, first you had to take the blankets out of the dolly center and tie them around your neck so you could be a superhero. And then you would carefully get up on the climber and we put down mats and pillows and so on. And the children would jump. It wasn't an aggressive fantasy game. It was really about mastering the jumping, right? But as they jumped, they would yell something out. You know, like Batman or Spider-Man. I'm again, dating myself by telling you those superheroes, not the current crop. And Roger watched that game day after day after day. And we watched Roger watching and we were thinking, oh dear, Roger's really being left out of this game. Roger can't jump. This game is not a good game. And we would try to get the kids to play something else, but three-year-olds want to do what they want to do, right? And during free play every day, they jump, they jump, they jump, they jump. And we were almost at the point of saying there shall be no more jumping at preschool, like how sick is that, you know? And we were fortunate. We had all the therapists on the floor, the pediatricians who had specialized in child development, the social workers, the child psychologists, the OT, the PT, the speech and language. We asked everybody for help and nobody knew what to do. So finally we thought, before we banned jumping, let's ask the kids about this. So we took it to circle and we sat with the kids and we said, kids, we have a problem. What's the problem? They all sat up straight because, you know, they wanted to help those dumb teachers, you know? And we said, you know what? We know you love the jumping game. Every day you jump and you jump and you jump. And Roger is your friend and he can't play the game. What should we do? And will it surprise you when I tell you they solved it like that? They said immediately, well, Roger should be the boss of the game. Well, of course, when you're three, it's all about being the boss of the game, right? So, okay, well, what do we do? They said, well, the first thing is Roger needs a cape. Well, of course he does. We hadn't even thought about that. We really were the dumb teachers. Roger, would you like to wear a cape? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we tied a cape around his neck and you would have thought he died and went to heaven. That was first. And then kids, what do we do? And they told us to position Roger in such a way that when they got onto the climber, they would make direct eye contact with Roger. And Roger would be the one to say jump. Now, the only thing is Roger didn't have the word jump because the speech therapists were working on ma, ma, ma, and buh, buh, buh. And we said, ah, ah, we need jump. And so they started working on jump. And like within three days, Roger was saying jump. So the child would make direct eye contact and they'd wait. And Roger was like a little monkey about it. He'd go, zzzzt. And stop. And the child said, come on. And then Roger would go again, zzzzt. And the child would jump and everybody would clap and it was a big hooray and Roger was the boss of the game, and he was being included. The kids figured it out. If you pose to them, what do we do about this challenge, often the kids will come up with an answer and we'll talk about that this afternoon too. How do you use circle time as an opportunity to build empathy? So that's really it for me. I think maybe there might be one more slide here. Oh yeah, quality inclusive early learning programs are where it all starts. Believe it, the work that you're doing is what's gonna make a real difference in the kind of society that we live in. And I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for all the amazing work you do day to day to day. And I look forward to getting to know some of you over the lunch hour. Thank you.