Hello!

      Our names are Laura & Meaghan and we teach a grade 6 class at Rideau Public School!

We have had such an amazing time with these students. We began the year with a few lessons on peer pressure and decision making before moving on to substance use and abuse. The students are SO smart and love to engage in critical thinking; from questioning the global trade system to complaining about government profits on cigarette tax!

Last week we did presentation on all different drugs and their effects. Some of the groups did skits, some did PSAa, and some made raps!

We just finished our last class today and they wrote letter to their '16 year old selves' about all the things they have learned this year. We hope that if they ever feel pressured in high school, they can open the letters and remember this class.

The students also wrote us a song to say goodbye!

-Laura and Meaghan

Hi there!

            We are Sarah and Holly and we volunteer in the School-to-Community program at QECVI. The School-to-Community program is filled with male and female students aged 15 – 19

        Our initial aim when we started teaching at QECVI was to develop a personal connection with the students. Since the students are close in age to us, we really felt that a connection with them would add an element of comfort and trust in our conversations, since we would be covering a various range of pretty serious topics, and we wanted conversation to flow freely. We like to think that we have achieved this objective! Every week we receive fewer and fewer submissions into our anonymous question box  - we believe this is because the students are much more comfortable now simply asking their questions to us during class time!

        Our classes are focused around discussions and conversations. We introduce a new topic each week and then we like to hear what the students already know about it, and what they would like to know. What we love about QECVI is that every week is different. The STC students all have varied schedules so every student might not be available each time we come into the school. Because of this, we are constantly meeting new students and having an interesting array of perceptions and opinions in our classes. The students are very participative and love to share their own views about things we are discussing.

       So far in class, we have covered nutrition, healthy relationships, contraception, pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and an introduction to substance abuse. Going forward, we will go deeper into discussions on illegal substances. Following this, we would like to give the students the chance to be creative and have some fun with our last class, where we are planning to create time capsules with the students! We will all write letters to ourselves to be opened in 5 years, as well as things we have learned from our time in class. We think this will be a pretty fun day last day to spend together.

         We have really enjoyed spending time with the students at QECVI and will be sad to reach the end of our lessons in just a few weeks. We are looking forward to our last couple of classes and we hope the students are too!

Holly & Sarah