Shaping the future for Indigenous Students

My Native Studies 30 class is going to create cards to hand out to their peers in the school or at our open house night in April. These cards will consist of pictures of whatever they choose, but will carry a message of health, wellness, culture, hope, resiliency and reconciliation. We run a initiative here at the school called Following Their Voices. Following Their Voices is an initiative designed to raise the educational achievement and participation of Saskatchewan's First Nations, Métis and Inuit students. Following Their Voices focuses on enhancing relationships between students and teachers, creating structures and supports for teachers and school administrators to co-construct teaching and learning interactions with students and creating safe, well-managed learning environments.

Update (June 13, 2019)

Well first of all I would like to thank Imagine Action once again for believing in teachers so that we can empower our students in positive meaningful ways.
My class of Native Studies 30 students had a few tasks to complete in order to make this a huge success. First of all, we had an open house on April 11th/19 where we shared our FTV Voices. (students voices, parent voices, & teacher voices). We handed them out and watched as parents, guests, and students read the things that we had to share about FTV (Following Their Voices). Some of the statements were negative and most were positive, but this initiative has been a learning experience for our school, students, parents and teachers.
The second part of our project was to bring a cultural piece into the classroom. My students were engaged in a beading activity. They made mitten key chains. They first of all had to bead a flower design on the top of the leather, attach the leather to a second piece, stuff it, sew the mitts together and then sew fur to the top along with a leather piece attached to the key ring. It took many hours of patience, and hard work, but most have completed their projects. Most importantly students were exposed to what is required when beading projects and all of the hard work put into beading. I loved seeing the project unfold as each student has their own taste and style in colors.

Update (June 25, 2019)

First of all, I would like to thank the Imagine Action team for allowing teachers and students to benefit from such a wonderful program. This is my second year receiving a grant to enhance student learning in my classroom. This year I chose, a hands on beading project to do with my Native Studies 30 class. You can see from the power point that our beading was a huge success.

As a side project, we "Shared our Voices" with our Carlton School Community. Our ultimate reason for sharing this initiative was to get feed back from students, parents & teachers about Following Their Voices. This initiative is used to enhance the graduation rate amongst FNMI (First Nation, Metis & Inuit ) students. Carlton is a school that fully participates in this initiative. We were trying to inform families about what this is, and what our students, parents, and teachers think about this and how it is going so far this year. It was quite informative to see how parents reacted to this, some new of the initiative but some did not. I was glad that we took the time to interview and share our views as it pertains to our classes each day!

Thanks for the opportunity to bring "a hands on project" to my classroom.
I look forward to thinking of something new for next year.
Ms. Vandale