This we we were privileged to hear from Brenda LaFormme. She joined us from NY and was able to share with us all sorts of practices, stories and ways of thinking of the Haudenoshonee people. She had a variety of things to show the students and took plenty of time to answer their questions. At the end of the story she gave the students a story and asked them to re-tell the story (about why their dolls do not have faces) to someone else. If you haven't heard the story yet it would be a great thing to ask about. We continued to look at various other aspects of the confederacy and will continue to do so next week.

This week we began our study of a second historical model of democracy. Students were asked to "read" a wampum belt and then we learned and read more about them to try to better understand this important historical record. Students also began working on their own personal wampum designs.

Guest Speaker: On Wednesday, Feb 10th we will get have a live presentation and visit from Iroquois educator Brenda LaForme. This is a really unique opportunity as Brenda lives in NY and works at the Iroquois Indian Museum. Having shifted into a virtual presentation has allowed us to have her in our classroom. There will be a small charge for this "virtual field trip" that will come to you through school cash.

This week we discussed a variety of scenarios that may have presented itself in Ancient Athens. Students use context clues to determine who and where the scenario took place. We also looked at how time is measured in BCE and CE (a great connection to integers which they just looked at in Math). We also enjoyed about half our classmates present their current events presentation.

This week we studied how the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects and shapes our everyday life in Canada. We looked at some case studies, but also talked about the recently announced state of Emergency and how this temporarily gives governments powers to curb some of these freedoms for the protection of our health and health system.

This week students began a study of a champion of democracy. We will see how so many of the rights we are assured of in Canada have come as a result of the hard work of men and women of the past and how that work continues. Students are working to complete organized internet research that involved fact checking and evaluating sources for reliability and then creating a character card for their person which will be displayed and presented.

Did you hear about some unfair new rules in grade 6 this week? Don't worry they weren't real, they were all part of our lessons. This was a fun week in Social studies. We learned about King John and the Magna Carta and how that set the stage for the important rule that LEADERS had to obey the law of the land and how our Canadian Charter makes it so that our leader can NOT arbitrarily take away the rights of the citizens.

Maybe to you this doesn't actually sound like fun? Well we learned how important this lesson is when I instituted some really outrageous rules that denied students the ability to use the washroom or and forced them do the Chicken Dance under the penalty of losing recess. After this small taste of unjust and arbitrary rule changes I think we all realize how important it is to have rights that are protected by the Charter and entrenched in our Constitution.

Rest assured students will not actually have to abide by these ridiculous rules!

Students finished up their pillars of democracy. We will be displaying and presenting those next week. Students also looked at some real world examples of what can happen when one of these pillars is not up held. Next week students will begin to look at some of the Hero's of Democracy that have helped uphold these important values.

This week we spent a good amount of our time in Social Studies learning about the history and last impacts of residential schools. An email was sent to you on Wednesday with more information about this. As a reminder if you would like to experience the way that we participated in this as a class you can log on to your child's google classrooms and see the abbreviated videos that we watched together. As a class we will continue to look for ways to speak against injustice and be peacemakers and justice seekers in the world.

Next week students will be introduced to their Pillars of Democracy project which they will work on through the week.

This week students started with a quotation scavenger hunt in the library. Students read what famous people throughout history have had to say about democracy to begin to build their understanding of this important (but not totally perfect) system of government. We then spent the rest of the week working to understand some of the vocabulary words that will be important to our unit work in the coming weeks.

Next week: we will continue to study foundational aspects of democracy. Also, as treaty people who are called to the work of reconciliation we will also be participating in some Orange Shirt Day activities.

This week students thought of answers to the sentence stem "Everyone in our class has the right to...". They came up with many amazing answers. These answers were grouped into four groups. Together they agreed that in our class everyone has a right to:

1. Speak

2. Be Respected

3. Worship God

4. Be Safe

We then worked to figure out what kinds of responsibilities we had to in our classroom to make sure that these rights are protected. i.e. "To protect a person's right to speak we need to be still and quiet while other people are talking". or "To protect our class's right be safe we need to wear our masks properly when required to"

This is an excellent start to our study of democracy and the connection between rights and responsibilities of everyone within a democracy.