Planning and Final Message

Hi everyone! Nathan and Alex here one last time for our Orchard Garden CFE blog posts. 

    What an incredible few weeks it has been (and how incredibly quick it has seemed)! Today, we spent our time planning and preparing for our Summer Solstice Celebration which will be taking place on Thursday this week from 11am - 2pm at the Orchard Garden. We actually spent today doing a lot of solo work at home with a short zoom meeting in the morning to strategize. It definitely felt weird not being with everyone in person after two whole weeks together, but sometimes work-from-home days can be good too. For our Solstice Celebration, we are looking to incorporate the five senses as an overarching theme. Our workshop last week on soundscaping and senses (definitely check out that blog post) was really great and we wanted to continue that theme for our celebration. As teacher candidates who have a lot of great experiences and activities from our extended practicums, we also wanted to incorporate some of those into our Solstice event as well. We are looking to do some native wildflower seed bombs; activities about learning animal names in Halkomelem; demonstrate some of the produce we've grown in the garden by sharing a recipe and some food, and just celebrating the arrival of summer in our wonderful Orchard Garden.

    In terms of our big takeaway from today, I think it's cool to see how far we have come as educators. Each member of our planning group has such great ideas and it's so rewarding to be able to share our successes from practicum with others and use them again to refine our teaching skills. This CFE has been an outstanding opportunity to engage with learning experiences beyond a traditional classroom, and having the space to plan and lead a Solstice Celebration full of fun activities is such a great way to cap off our time. We also have a Saturday Workshop that we are planning for that will be equally rewarding and exciting. 

    We set off on a goal in week 1 to continue to explore what it means to leverage place as a powerful tool for learning and we sincerely believe that the Orchard Garden has provided us with an opportunity to do so. We hope to take these lessons forward and use them to become better educators and learners. Thanks so much for spending these last few weeks with us and we hope to see you at our Solstice event on Thursday! We want to close off our final blog post the same way we started: thanking the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people for their stewardship of the land and acknowledging that we have had the absolute privilege of learning, working, and playing on their unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory.