Hello Everyone!

As we move closer and closer to the Thanksgiving holiday, children around GTMS have been working steadily in their classrooms and getting ready for the upcoming holiday season. November is Native American Heritage Month along with Thanksgiving so our DEIB focused projects this month have been based around themes of gratefulness, community, and care. During the first week of November we had a few older alumni siblings visit the Primary ADM classrooms. They happily helped cut and prep paper leaf templates for an annual project we call the “Thank-Fall leaf” craft. Students are able to choose from 4 different leaf templates of trees they can see around Pennsylvania: gingko, maple, oak, and birch. They then can paint and decorate their leaf and afterwards write a message of gratitude on the back. We talk about what we love about ourselves, our families, our communities, and our environment to encourage mindfulness and feelings of thankfulness. Lower El extended this activity a step further and created a map highlighting the original, indigenous peoples of the Pennsylvania region. Together we read some materials from our Diversity library and discussed land acknowledgements. Some students wrote messages of gratitude to the Lenni-Lenape people, the original stewards of the land that became known as Philadelphia. This dedication and display is currently on view in the first floor lobby. Classrooms were also offered different corn/maize themed works as a means to represent Native American Heritage Month and continue conversations on caring for our earth and all it provides for us. Students were able to make use of a three part card work handed out last year that highlights the diverse range of indigenous housing structures that have existed across the Americas. A few classes made corn bread and ground their own corn to make fry bread inspired by a book in our Diversity Library Collection; Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story.

Many of the DEIB works that go out into our classrooms are based around language and literacy. There have been matching/memory works themed around a variety of artists and their artwork, most recently featuring Mexican artists, which are offered both with and without text. Younger students are able to recognize and match the pictures familiarizing themselves with different works of art while older students are able to match both the pictures and text and learn the names of the artists and works themselves, adding both a cultural perspective along with a literacy element to the work. Three and four part cards are another way for students to develop early reading skills and can also serve as a means to introduce new languages as well. Children match the picture presented on the card with the corresponding text on its label. There have been cards featuring Spanish, Hawaiian, and Hebrew previously and we are continuously adding more options as we go along in this work. There are currently books in our Diversity Library featuring Spanish, Vietnamese, Hindi, Chinese, Hebrew, Yiddish, Cherokee, and Plains Cree and more are being added when possible. Two years ago GTMS held a book drive to enhance our Helena A. Grady Diversity Library collection. This special selection resides right in the first floor lobby and everyone is welcome to browse our books and pull any materials as needed. The generosity of those that donated helped expand our collection greatly and allowed our school to add more books at different reading levels, so that we now have more material that is appropriate for Toddlers, Primary, and Lower Elementary. 

Selected reading from this month’s highlights collection shelf of the Helena A. Grady Diversity Library: 

• Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story by Kevin Noble Maillard
• We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorell
• When the Shadbush Blooms by Carla Messinger and Susan Katz
• The People Shall Continue by Simon J. Ortiz
• Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Leitich Smith
• You Hold Me Up by Monique Gray Smith
• Harvest Days: Giving Thanks Around the World by Kate DePalma

Wishing everyone a wonderful, long holiday weekend!

-Ms. Allison (awiedman@gtms.org)