Our programming has to be reflective of the children and what they know and what their backgrounds are here living in Southern Ontario. So, we can\u2019t be denying that, we have to be able to walk the two cultures. And it\u2019s always a challenge on how we adapt our activities and be mindful that we are here to support the Inuit culture. So, part of what we do here is we always look to the IQ principles and the values and we look to see that the children are reflecting the attitudes and beliefs of honesty and respectfulness and perseverance and generosity. All of these are values that are universally accepted but to realize that the Inuit also have these values as a base on which to interact with one another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s about making our programming bicultural in that we have to reflect what the children know here and also build in some traditional ways of play that were used up north. So traditionally, you\u2019d be using bones, you\u2019d be using stones, you\u2019d be using furs like from different animals, you could be using a bird\u2019s wing. There\u2019d be things that would be handmade as traditional toys. So, making the bones into something that we can play with, something that we can build with, something that will develop a skill. So, by using the bones as loose parts or using pinecones as loose parts or using more natural materials. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, we\u2019ve incorporated the seal skin. We can pretend that we\u2019re scrubbing it down because the skins used to need cleaning, so we have it in the sensory table with soap and water. We also had the ulus and the savics, which are the woman\u2019s knife and the men\u2019s knife. They are traditional tools that were used in everyday life. And so we\u2019re using it at the Playdoh table so the children are learning all the manipulation skills that they would use using tools down here in the south. But we just adapt it and you can see the children the way they manipulate the ulus, it\u2019s been a familiar object that they\u2019ve seen and used. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the activities and also in the play space itself, it\u2019s important that children see themselves reflected in the images that we have, in the books that we have, in the stories that we tell. That the children can be proud of who they are, have a sense of what it is like being up north in a land with no trees versus coming down here and having a different experience of what seasons are down here versus what things are like up north. So, we use a variety of resources. We use the books, sometimes we use videos and quite often we lead children in songs so that they can imagine that they\u2019re actually driving a dog team and they\u2019re going out hunting and that sort of thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, there\u2019s a way of incorporating the two cultures because people do feel home sick from time to time. But they want to be able to see that somehow the basis of their culture is being reflected in their children. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our programming has to be reflective of the children and what they know and what their backgrounds are here living in Southern Ontario. So, we can\u2019t be denying that, we have to be able to walk the two cultures. And it\u2019s always a challenge on how we adapt our activities and be mindful that we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1179","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1180,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1179\/revisions\/1180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}