Intentional teaching ALL YEAR

What are your thoughts on keeping the coversation on truth and reconciliation as well as orange shirt day going all year when teaching? I feel often times its a one and done concept but it needs to keep going all year.

Continuing this conversation beyond this one day is crucial. I agree with you Alexa. I think that talking about this beyond just one day is the only true way to make change. This is a great starting point and opens the conversation and should 100% be continued

I think we need to be intentional about teaching Indigenous topics, voices, stories,culture, and history in our classrooms as often as possible all year long.
We can interweave indigenous culture in every subject we teach. For example, in a physical education class, games of chance such as The Hand Game or The Moccasin Game can be played in early elementary. Or a sharing circle discussion on any topic from what students observe in the natural world or discussing what they learned from an indigenous story.

I believe this is an important concept to learn about throughout the year. There is so much to learn within this topic that it takes more than just one day or one week to really allow students to start to realize what this day is about and why we wear orange shirts.

I totally agree! In my opinion, I think teachers should incorporate Indigenous based lessons naturally rather than because they have to due to Orange Shirt Day or Truth and Reconciliation Day. Indigenous picture books, videos talking about different aspects of their culture or even Indigenous crafts are all great ways to organically teach about Indigenous perspectives. This should be done all throughout the year and not just focused on when teachers are told to.

I agree that this topic should be something that is remembered and talked about year round. However, the only thing I am afraid of with doing this is that students will slowly forget the importance of it if it is mentioned every day or too often. I feel like you could do a big activity every month and highlight the importances of truth and reconciliation day. This may be better than doing something daily and all year round because students will not take it seriously after a while and then it will be the last thing they want to talk about even though it should be talked about as often as possible.

I definitely think Truth and Reconciliation should be talked about all year long! I think there is so much that can be taught about this topic and I feel like only having one specific day for it is not enough. Although it does not need to be talked about every single day, I think coming back to it every once in a while throughout the school year would be very beneficial to students.