 The commentary and questions are coming in fast and furiously from all over the province which is incredibly exciting. I want you to know that if we don't have an opportunity to use your comment or to reflect on your question all of these questions and comments are going to be collated into a study guide that will ultimately be available online and as participants you'll receive notice of when that's available for you to review. So the richness of the conversation that's taking place in all eight sites will not be lost it will be captured and put into one place. But here's a smattering of the kinds of things that we're hearing from across the province. A question from Jerry Lynn in Medicine Hat who asks, do you have any inclusion success stories to share of children with severe behavior concerns? Any any quick perspectives on on that? Yeah and you know we were talking about this over dinner last night that behavior is often the real reason why people are excluded right. It's not just the fact that they have autism it's what do they do. There was a little a mom who got in touch with me from rural Manitoba who told me a story about her child's center where her little one with autism had been attending the center from the time he was about 15 months old. They didn't even have a diagnosis yet. Subsequently they got that and I heard your table talking about the one-to-one worker approach. This little boy had had a one-to-one worker who basically became his bridge to everything that went on in the program. He was so reliant on this one staff person and he did not too bad when that staff person was there. Only one day something happened in her life and she wasn't there anymore. She quit her job quickly. It took them a while to find another worker. There was funding but they couldn't find somebody because it was in a small town. You could make more money working at Tim Hortons than coming to work at the daycare center. So in the meantime for about six weeks each week somebody different worked with the child. You can just imagine how crazy that made this child feel and he didn't have any language. So he quickly showed through his behavior this doesn't work for me and what he was doing was pulling hair and he was expelled from the center for dangerous hair pulling. Do you know that four-year-olds are the most likely age group to be expelled more so than any other age up to you know graduation from high school. So behavior is really the thing that trips us up and now this mom needed to get in a car and drive her son to a community you know 40 or 50 kilometers away and where the next daycare center was. So behavior is so challenging but to come with a success story yes. Can I just tell a quick one and we'll go back to some of these wonderful questions and reflections. My own work with kids with additional support needs happened at a play therapy program at Children's Hospital early in my career and there was a little boy who came to our program with some real actually it was a number of children who came to our program with really significant behavior challenges. We were the place where kids came when they got expelled from preschool. That program actually has been shut down over the last few years so there's not that as the option anymore but we got all the hardest children. There was one little boy in our program who was so physically aggressive and he was like a little boy but big little boy if you know what I mean he was like a hulk and I mean I remember one day seeing him on top of the wooden play structure that was in our preschool classroom tossing kids off the top of it like King Kong it was really scary and his mom was a biker chick I'm just going to put it like that okay she was scary too and so she'd come to nursery school with him riding on the back of her motorcycle and drop him off at our program and Jamie was his name I can see him to this day one of the things that Jamie really liked to do was play dress up and for whatever reason he would go into the dramatic play area and he would get all dolled up and his mom was on the other side of the two-way mirror having a fit that her son was putting on the girly girly stuff but he would put on a little wig and this is before we worried about lice okay I'm dating myself a little bit and he had this little purple chiffon dress that he put on and the high heels and when he got all dressed up it was like it let his kinder gentler side come out and when he was wearing the outfit that was when he wanted to sit on your lap and have hugs and he really just calmed right down I'm not sure what you know the psychologist would say about that but I'll tell you what it worked and so what we did was we allowed Jamie to wear the dress-up clothes and he was with us for two and a half hours a day and slowly over the next few months we would you know say okay you need to take off the dress-up clothes to have snack but then you can put them right back on and then we would say well you need to take off the dress-up clothes when we go outside to play and then you can put them back on and slowly slowly Jamie learned you know and he learned to kind of impulse control you know he was able to build that over the year that he was with us and he did actually successfully transition into a mainstream program after that year with us and his mom settled down about the idea of you know her son playing dress-up we had many conversations about the value that boys and girls have by trying on different roles you know just to say it's never a quick fix which is usually what we're looking for I wish I would have brought that magic wand that would fix all the kids but the truth is we are the magic wands ourselves and it's through our loving consistent approach day after day where kids know that even when they're bad we still like them even when they're naughty this is still a place that they're welcome to come and at least each child has at least one staff person who genuinely cares about them and to me that's that's the magic wand give it the time be consistent and you can overcome even the greatest challenges Deborah here's a really specific question from Calgary I'm gonna ask you to give a concise reply if you're able to what is the role of AIDS how can we ensure that all children can participate equitably without the intervention of an aid okay I like to think about AIDS in the classroom as being there to enhance ratio as opposed to being there to provide one-to-one support so that's the first thing the second thing is I think that AIDS are often given the responsibility to care for the most challenging of all children where the early childhood teachers who've had the background and the training get to only look after the easy kids so there's something to me that's a little off-kilter about that and the truth is that many times we don't have the AIDS either because we can't find them or we can't keep them so we need to work with what we've got and I'm gonna go back to the town daycare story they didn't have AIDS they didn't have funding but through the willingness of the staff you know to break it down and figure out what do we need to do and to be a strong team together it shouldn't be only one person's job here's a great suggestion from right here in the room that successful strategies can include picture communications symbols visual schedules for example are universal universal strategy that benefit all children and support inclusion and here's a question also around gifted children what can be done at the early childhood level to support gifted children is it too early I don't think it's ever too early I mean again if we think about early intervention it works best for all children wherever they are on that continuum so just as we individualize our program approach for kids with disabilities so too should we be doing that with children who are gifted and talented and I think that all too often the negative behaviors that we see at least from some children are signals that our program is not meeting the needs of children who are bright and those are often the ones who show us through their behavior this is boring this program sucks and especially if they've been there since they were two how many times have they done that activity already so mix it up you know I'm not saying that all children need to be taught their ABCs like I think there's time for that and you know literacy in the environment but some children really want to know that so it's okay to work with those children and give them more that's again modifying and accommodating and individualizing and some insight from our francophone group in Calgary who recommend that the environment for for young learners be adapted through classroom discussions and explanation of what what children need that books should be shared with students on how how to accommodate their their classmate and also that there should be quiet time allowed should a child need that time to regroup and that that there should be lots of elasticity and permission for that to happen I want everyone here to remember those good ideas because this afternoon I'm going to show you a lot more photos of early childhood classrooms and you're going to see examples of each of those things in the photos that I'm going to show you and Red Deer reminds us that it this work may require us to get rid of some of the rules just because you should be doing certain things on the carpet at certain times doesn't mean that you can't be flexible and I think you use the word flexibility as key to building inclusive environments and Red Deer is echoing that sentiment want to remind you that these thoughts will be collated and collected and so none of this wisdom and insight is going to be lost back to you Deb thank you very much thanks and thanks to everybody for those good contributions there's such a lot of wisdom here and across your province I mean you know it's easy for me to come in as the outsider and sort of talk up here but it's you who are doing the real work and so the chance to keep on sharing and your good ideas with each other is just critical so please do visit that website and see the rest of the contributions that will be posted there