 My program is called The Little Métis Sing With Me. It's developed here at the Louis Real Institute back in about 2007 and it's been running all over the province since then. It is a parent-child program, meaning that it's a family literacy program, but it's based on Métis culture, learning about culture and pride in your culture. So it has many parts to it. It is what it looks like as a group of parents or guardians, grandparents bring their five years in younger so you can have infants there, you can have four or five-year-olds there. They start out in a circle. They're singing rhymes and songs. They are, we are reading to the kids and we try to expose them as much as possible to Métis books that cover different topics and also have Métis language. So lots of interaction between the parents and kids, lots of bonding is happening, lots of language is happening and the point of that family literacy piece is that that goes home with them because we know parents are the first teachers and the most important teachers to the kids and doing this kind of stuff early, lots of language is just going to give the kids a head start in school. Our goal in the program is not to entertain the kids, our goal is to teach the parents to interact, to use literacy, language, song, rhymes, books at home. So we use the same rhymes and songs every week so that they know them, the kids know them, the repetition is so important. They use them at home for bedtime, for behavioral issues. Using rhymes is a great way to handle behavior issues with kids. You start singing to them in the safe way. Suddenly you've got their attention. It's also a great way to teach the language. So part of the little Métis sing with me is introducing the Métis language. So we've got songs and rhymes that may just have the word for hello or it might be a whole rhyme in Métis and the facilitator, that group of parents, can decide how much they want to introduce. We have a program called Speaking Métis that is family-based. It's beginner Métis and that can be used with our little Métis sing with me. All the little books, rhymes and songs from this program are on a CD and also available online. So parents have lots of access to it and to hearing the language spoken properly and it's all based on stuff you do at home, things you would say to your kids like it's time for bed or let's go brush your teeth, things that are at home, what's in the kitchen, what's what what are the words for play, those kind of things. So it's very family-based so it goes well with the sing with me which is a family program. The other good thing about the little Métis sing with me is you have this beautiful bonding time with the parents and the kids with all this language and then you separate. So you have parent topics and you have centers and activities for the kids. So the parents get to cover things that are important to them as parents but also about their culture. A lot of parents are coming to us not having grown up with knowledge of their culture. So we can have guest speakers in, we can teach them beating, we can learn about history. There's so many options that the parent group kind of gets to steer. There's a group in Selkirk that what they do is the parents make a pair of moccasins. So they're learning beating, they're learning how to make moccasins by the end of the program. They've been discussing all this cultural stuff and they go home with this beautiful pair of moccasins. The kids are doing different crafts, play activities, they've got furs to touch, they've got jigging music, they've they're getting exposed to the Métis language and it all wraps up at the end with a dance circle. So the kids, the parents are jigging, they're learning the heel-toe, they're playing musical chairs with jigging music. So it's a very positive celebrate your culture kind of program with all sorts of other things happening, literacy, bonding, learning about books, learning about print. So it's it's been running for about 10 years in various communities and we are still training the Lawyer Rail Institute trains. We train teachers like Braureans, Head Start staff, daycare staff come and take this training. Not only do they use it in its entirety, they use pieces of it in their other other work. So I think it's really an important program because for one thing it's early years and we're involving the parents helping them be the best first teacher they can be helping them with their confidence and we're helping those kids get the best start they can get and be so proud of the fact that they are Métis and be celebrating that. Early years is really important in the in the whole scheme of education. You've got kids that are confident and have been exposed to books and print and language, they have a better start when they go to school and as for the Métis we are helping families get re-educated in some of that culture and history they lost in the dark times. So we're pretty proud of this program and it's it's been quite popular. So as far as measuring success of the program we first piloted it in a community in southeast of Manitoba and we formally did assessments and it came out very well liked by the parents. It rated quite highly but informally there's all sorts of ways to measure success. One is the numbers of families you have returning that program that we piloted has been running for 10 almost 10 years now. They have an incredible number of families that just keep coming back. The moms come back with the next child and the next child. They'll have like 20 families show up at a session which is huge and it's been going on for years. They get people coming from other smaller communities around so that's a sign of success right there. It's obviously happening by word of mouth. These parents are returning. That means they're getting something out of it the parents and the children. Often we think of early years programs as being just for the children. It has to have something for the parents as well or the parents aren't going to return. So that's one sign of success. When you're facilitating a program you know there's success by about the third week. When you see the little ones recognizing the rhyme you're doing knowing the gestures or the actions or the words asking for it again and again you already see the importance of language and repetition in rhyme in them developing their language skills and the parents will say he's asking for the smooth road rhyme or he's asking for the I'm a little matey song. That success to us that the kids are loving this language and asking for it and expecting what comes next knowing the actions. So as a facilitator you know things are going well when that's happening. Another way we see success right in the program as a facilitator when we share rhymes and songs and then we have a book sharing time. So as a facilitator I read a book to the group and then we have a whole choice of books that the parents are invited the kids are invited to come and help themselves and and sit with their child or children and read for the first couple weeks they're awkward maybe they're not used to reading to their kids it's a very short lasts about 10 minutes as you move on by about the fifth week you can't get them to stop the story sharing time it's like really we have to clean up the books guys because we have other things to do so I've seen that time and time again in the programs that I have facilitated and that's always a sign of success and sometimes parents won't talk much about their matey history as the program goes on as you have these guests in and you talk about genealogy and you talk about the history of the area parents start to open up and talk about this and just seeing that pride in that interest is a sign of success to me so those are all kind of informal signs of success I've been working trying to help with with language programs and developing resources for about 10 years and I see more and more interest and I think it is huge to the identity of the people part of the reason the matey are a nation is because they developed their own language and that's something the matey own and losing it would just be a travesty so I think it's really important that the Mitchef language is included in all our materials in our early years programs for one thing if kids are exposed to the Mitchef language to the indigenous language of their people early it's much easier for them to learn they get the sounds in their head that catch on so quickly so much harder as an adult so as a creator of resources LRI believes in including the Mitchef language in everything we do but especially our early years programs that's the key to learning languages and saving our language if our kids aren't speaking our language the language is going to die so we have to get families interested and start with the kids young and have family programs and the little matey sing with me is a family literacy program it's also a family language program they can start using those words and get involved in as many language programs as they can so I'm hoping that it's a real start for families I've been involved here at the LRI for 10 years and there have been so many changes just in that 10 years the things that have been added to to education in the schools the amount we're asked to come out and do presentations what's included in the curriculum teachers asking for matey specific resources whereas everything people were happy with sort of this pan indigenous approach now they are asking for specific matey resources so I think the next 10 years that's just going to go faster we've got schools that are teaching indigenous languages we didn't have that before and it's going to happen in more and more schools we've got university classes starting and for the matey the Mitchef language is a little bit behind some of the bigger groups like the Cree and Ojibwe so I can see the Mitchef language will be coming up and will be being taught in in more schools and at the university level resources are just coming out you know it used to be hard to find especially early years resources with Mitchef language now you can come to LRI you can go to the Gabriel de Mont Institute all their children's books have Mitchef in them it's becoming the norm now so you know in 10 years we're going to look back and and think how crazy it was that there was no Mitchef language in the schools so I see things going with it