Introduction
Our project
Our school community takes pride in being innovative and rising to any challenge presented; all while emphasizing learning through play. At ACMS, our play projects focus on student engagement and hands-on passion projects that allow our students to widen their horizons with information and to critically think about the challenges that they face with living in a remote Indigenous community. Our goal is to offer diverse, unique, and realistic learning opportunities for our students, all while solving real world problems. With our team as facilitators, students will take the lead in creating a water treatment train with the resources provided from sponsors. Our students will reach for the stars through exploration and play.
Tell us about your team and your school community.
Our school team consists of staff members that have been an integral part of the Amos Comenius school community for many years. Within our school team, we bring forward a wide variety of skills and training areas that help meet the diverse needs of our school population. By collaborating regularly, we are able to offer ideas, projects, and innovative solutions to refine and enhance learning for our students. Our focus area for this project is our 2022-2023 grade 7 class. This group of students have very interesting and creative personalities that love to work with their hands to make things. In past years, teachers have noticed this trend within this group of students and found great success when the students were allowed to choose unique individual ways to express themselves. This is very important to our school because since the pandemic and the forced shift to an increased use of technology, we recognized the need for a change in the ways we teach and learn. These new modes of learning sparked this group’s curiosity and allowed some lower level academic students to prosper, disengaged students to find their passions, and a new sense of classroom connectedness was formed.
Tell us about the importance of learning through play for your team and for your students.
Learning through play is particularly important in this group of students in order to maximize learning and student engagement. They enjoy collaborating in small groups with similar student strengths to contribute to a large collective class project. This form of learning has brought a new sense of fun to their education, and we as educators recognize the need to further support this passion. We believe that when this group is presented with the opportunity to build/make a project for a meaningful purpose to help their community, they will devote their utmost effort in succeeding. Overall, this revised method of teaching and learning is becoming a trend in ACMS, and previous classroom challenges and stresses seem to be alleviated due to this reinvented approach to learning. With a focus on art expression, technology games, maker spaces, hands on work, and passion projects, all of our students can find enjoyment and authentic learning. All of our students play a vital role in the success of the project, and they all count on one another.
Tell us about your interest in joining the Canadian Playful Schools Network.
The Canadian Playful Schools Network provided our school with an opportunity that couldn’t be missed. We want to continue the love of learning and play within our junior high student population. Through the CPSN, we hope that our students will find connections with other Indigenous schools to allow them to discuss and connect through their similarities and their challenges. Secondly, we would love if our students could connect with other students of similar age group in hope to open their eyes to different engaging projects and interests. We would also hope that our students could connect with other rural school communities in order to open their eyes to other successes and challenges that they face as a community.
Discover what we’ve accomplished in the year 2022-2023 !