Lesson Plans

Our learning team piloted lessons with grade 8 - 10.  These lessons were all co-constructed.  As a team, we created and delivered lessons.  Thereafter, we co-assessed student learning.  Ms. Faye O'Neil, our Aboriginal Support worker, was always a member of our teaching team. 

Residential School Survivors

Project of Heart
Social Studies 8 / 9
Learning Targets:
  • Students will learn the value of primary sources while learning about the history of residential schools in Canada
Resources needed:HOOK:
500 Years in 2 Minutes by Wab Kinew - video on YouTube

Lesson:
In pairs, students select an interview from Where Are the Children.  Watching and listening to interviews, students use the following questions as a guide to understanding the role that Indian Residential School had them.  Each student records their own information.
  1. Name of the interviewee
  2. Where are they from?
  3. When did the person go to residential school?
  4. Age they started school?
  5. Sum up their first few days at the residential school and compare with your first few days.
  6. How did the residential school experience effect the interviewee?
  7. Describe the feelings, the emotions of the interviewee.
  8. What stands out from the video for you personally? What resonates with you?
Think - Pair - Share
Each pair of students share their understanding with their partner. 
Questions 5, 6, 7, and 8 are discussed as a class and students share the common understanding of Indian Residential Schools. 
 Picture
Social Studies 8 / 9
As an extension to the lesson Residential School Survivors, students participate in Project of Heart.  Students create necklaces as a mindful exercise of honouring children who did not survive Indian Residential School.  Students keep necklaces as a reminder of their learning.  In addition, students can choose to make additional necklaces which will be forwarded to Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women to be sold in fundraisers.  This non-profit grassroots movement supporting Indigenous women and raising awareness about injustices towards Indigenous women.

Indigenous Voices: An Inquiry Approach

Social Studies 10

Full lessons, day by day, are posted on our Library Learning Commons BLOG with the tag 'indigenous voices'.

Learning Targets:
  • Use inquiry process and skills to: ask questions: gather, interpret, and analyze ideas; and communicate finding and decisions.
  • To explore injustice, oppression and social change in the development of human rights.
Lessons:
Using Deborah Ellis's book, Looks Like Daylight: Voices of Indigenous Kids, students read interviews with kids from around North America. 
Library Learning Commons @ South Delta Secondary School