Pre-School Early Learning Graduation Day

 

Pre-School Graduation Day

A Welcome From Early Learning Daycare

As the Team Leader of your children's Early Learning Daycare I'm thrilled to welcome parents, grand/step-parents and all other significant influencers to this celebration. Your five-year-olds have successfully graduated from the national Early Learning Program. They have had a wonderful first five years of life, transitioning seamlessly from the womb to our richly intersectional training environment.

You and your children may not have seen much of each other over the past five years, as they come and go from daycare and you come and go from work, meetings, Zoom calls, fitness regimes, therapy, and professional upgradng. Seeing them up here on this stage, about to receive their Childcare Graduation Certificates, you might hardly recognize your kids. You might be amazed at how big they have grown, how many tattoos they have, how much longer, or maybe shorter, their hair is, and how their eyes are still that deep colour that Grandma's were!

Maybe you have stayed in touch with your kids through the regular texts they have sent you (we encourage maintaining close ties between students and family), so you know how many acronyms and emojis they have learned at Daycare! 

They have learned to fit into a crowd and navigate time. That means they go online a lot, and rarely stray into time-wasting day-dreamy private introspection. Becoming fully absorbed into our inclusive and equitable shared learning environment is key to their social adjustment. They have had opportunities to play with blockchains, enjoy digital inclusivity games, and do real-time anti-bias role playing. 

They have practised performative allyship in non-racialized learning rooms, so you know they're prepared for primary school. It's hard to believe that that used to be the beginning of schooling, back in the unprogressive era of half-day kindergarten. It's amazing how far society has come since children once played in back yards and spent time at home for the first five empty unstructured years of their lives.

You will be proud of the graduation which takes place today, and there is of course nothing competitive about this Awards Day: every child will be the winner! Each child will take their place in the rainbow. So get out your smartphone camera, and in case some non-custodial parents aren't sure which child is theirs please refer to the display of selfies projected onto the wall behind the kids, with the name of each one displayed (with pronoun preferences) under their head-shots.

The Native Person's Ties to the Land: Green Childhood in a Green Birthplace

     

        He grew up in an era when kids roamed freely in residential neighbourhoods and parents were less watchful. He and his friends played in their large gardens and the woods close to their homes. They went out in all weather, sun-bathing or puddle-jumping as conditions dictated. In summer they picked blackberries, and the taste of the sweet juice bursting on the tongue was a memory they never lost, it spread deep into their unconscious like the stain of blackberry juice on clothing.

       They combed the local beaches and were accustomed from toddler-hood to cold salt water and sand between the toes. They dug clams and out on the reef collected oysters. They made friends with crows. They rode bikes to the tops of hills where they ate picnics while surveying the beloved landscape of their childhood spread out below, the roof-tops of houses hiding within the remnant oak forest and the air alive with birdsong.

       This outdoor life, these sensations, smells and sights bound them to land and climate and fed their spirits through the later challenges of adulthood, the highs and lows and whatever life brought them.
       Who were these children of this landscape where nature still survived in residential areas, and kids played on the land and not at computer terminals? They were grandchildren of immigrants to British Columbia from Great Britain and Europe, twentieth century kids who lived a green childhood, on intimate terms with the landscape. They were native to this land (meaning, born here) and native to nowhere else: this was their homeland. It had seeped into their spirits and personalities and by absorbing it they owned it, which is another way of saying that it owned them.

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