Several of our staff members worked on an SEL Inquiry Grant at Bridge this year.  They collaborated with our Student Voice Committee made up of staff and students.  Here are the results of our work:

January: Teachers and Staff were reporting similar behaviours school-wide.  These included: running in the halls, students wandering indoor (especially during recess and lunch), using washrooms as a social space, talking back to adults challenges with respecting the physical environment, self-regulating at lunch time, taking accountability when mistakes were made. 

We asked ourselves: How can we use school-wide language of "Building Bridges" to model and embed the practice of kindness into our classrooms, our school community and during our extra-curricular events and activities?

What we tried: Kindness Displays, Morning Announcements, Weekly Newsletter articles, Family Team Activities, Re-vamping our School-wide graphic to represent Bridges of Kindness (previously GRRRR!)

May/June: We shifted from teacher-led inquiry to student-led inquiry.  We surveyed our Student Voice Committee and they surveyed students in each classroom.

Our morning announcers read real-life examples of students at Bridge being kind to self, others and the environment each day. 

A school-wide art project took place to help design introduce students to the Building Bridges of Kindness school wide language. All students were encouraged to think more about the language and to have the chance to create a “Building Bridges of Kindness” visual.  All student’s artwork was displayed on class bulletin boards to be viewed by the whole school. Some student ideas will then be incorporated into the creation of an official school visual.

Please see the attached document from our Inquiry Grant Celebration presentation for more information including details about our next steps in the journey.