Throughout the school year, we have had dedicated time at each professional development day and staff meetings to think, learn, share and reflect about our school story. Upon our return in September this year, our focus was to continue to gather and bring our community together, with both our returning students and our new students. We had 65 new students to Quilchena this past year, which is 1/3 of our school population. We continued with our Quilchena Care Circles to bring in our new student population so that they were part of our common school language and felt connected. A continued focus on SEL made a tremendous impact in fostering a positive learning environment.

Mid year we agreed that our work with connection, kindness and belonging is never done. We had been intentional in building a sense of belonging and we noticed that our students felt connected to their friends and to the staff. They were able to identify at least 1 adult that cares for them and felt they could ask for help when needed.

We were ready to shift and zoom in on how we could support students in feeling connected to their learning and support those who didn't. Our hunch was students would feel more connected to their learning if they were provided with multiple entry points to share understanding and if we made explicit how this learning connected to the big ideas of our BC curriculum.

Here is what staff noticed and celebrated:

Students felt more connected to learning when provided with time to share in small groups first to build confidence and capacity when sharing their understanding

Student engagement increased when lessons and activities were hands-on and used different entry points for learning.

Here is what staff noticed regarding the connection to learning and social emotional well-being:

I noticed increased confidence and more positive behaviour when the barrier of 'not knowing' was lifted and reassurance was given that learning takes time, patience and practice.

Spending more time exploring hands-on learning allowed students to be more playful during numeracy lessons, taking the worry away of 'not being good at math'. Their sense of themselves as a learner and connecting this to their learning improved their social emotional well-being.

Early ideas for Next Steps for the fall:

• Incorporate a Numeracy lens when doing Family Teams next year (Nature walk "Where do you seem math in our community?")
• Being intentional to have manipulatives accessible for students to access during lessons
• Being more visible with our learning - each division displaying their evidence of learning in math with 11x17 tableau posters
• Monthly school-wide interactive math bulletin board (i.e., number talks, fraction talks, puzzles, slow reveal graphs)
• Continue to build our teacher math resources, as well as build our picture book library that has a math theme
• Continue to access our District Math Consultant for lunch & learns and evening interactive math evenings
• Continue to use part of our professional development days to explore and use the rich resources our district has available to us, including the Foundations of Numeracy