Hi everybody!

We’re Lizzy and Rachel and we teach in the School-to-Community program at QECVI in Kingston.  This group is absolutely wonderful and filled with students aged 14-19. 

Our classes are filled with awesome discussions and conversations with students.  We love making connections and engaging with these students in a real way that makes everyone feel more comfortable in the classroom.  These students are funny and smart with tons of real life experience that brings all of our lesson content to life.  They are extremely eager to learn and we have had a great time watching them grow throughout the year.

Our lessons are filled with videos and activities that help to give students different perspectives and views about various topics.  In our time together, we’ve discussed healthy relationships, consent, online safety, and Snapchat safety.  These lessons have been awesome and our question box is filled with great comments every week.  From week to week we have had more and more questions in the question box, which has brought us joy knowing that our students are beginning to trust us and they are really absorbing the information in our lessons. Throughout the year, we have had time to learn about what type of learning strategies work for our students.

We’ve recently starting discussing sexual health and the anatomy of the body.  In order to start our lessons about sexual health in a light-hearted way, we began with a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3MyLt6l5n0

This is an example of how we integrate multimedia into our lessons to improve understanding.  The students seem to have great interest in this topic. It is one of our last units and we have waited until now to gain more trust and increase comfort levels in the classroom.

The students in our class teach us just as much as we teach them and every session we learn something new about the students. It is wonderful! We love our class and we can’t wait to dive deeper into contraception, STIs, substance abuse, and many other interesting health-based topics. 

Rachel and Lizzy