The West Kootenay Early Years Conference is for educators, program facilitators, early years professionals, and students.  Join us for the day to learn, listen, share, and be inspired.  This conference welcomes residents of the Columbia Basin.

As residents of the Columbia Basin, the West Kootenay Early Years Conference Committee would like to acknowledge the Indigenous Peoples of all the lands that we are on today. We acknowledge, respect and honour the unceded traditional territories of the Ktunaxa, Secwepemc, Sinixt and Syilx Nations.

Presentations

Afternoon Workshops

Finding Community in Nature

Come and explore in a self-reflective, experiential workshop where you will be guided to work indoors or outside using environmental arts practices to engage with the supportive community we can find in nature with all our relations to nurture our self-care practices. We will work with the natural and recycled materials around us to create independently with our community in nature, and come back together online to share our experiences. Approaches to mindful connection with the land and its other-than-human beings will be explored for adults and children alike. The workshop will begin with a brief theoretical orientation to land-based therapeutic arts, followed by an outdoors, creative experiential.

*Participants will be required to prep outside or be outside during the workshop.

Staying Calm in the Chaos: How to Move Into Mindfulness in the Face of Others’ Reactivity

This workshop, ‘Staying Calm in the Chaos’ will give participants the tools they need to recognize and develop their own capacity to be mindful, grounded and balanced in any situation. Participants will learn a powerful process to use to support themselves and lean into mindfulness when others around them are charged, triggered and reactive. This will enable them to effectively respond from a place of calm, and objective stability. This can be used with participants’ own reactivity, or with children, co-workers, family members and in any charged situation.

Participants will be asked to submit a specific example of a scenario when they were faced with another’s reactivity and were perhaps caught off guard and didn’t respond as they would have liked to.

Softening the Edge: A Creative Exploration of Self-Compassion

This is an experiential creative art workshop on self-care while living and working in a pandemic. Self-care is crucial as an antidote to burnout and compassion fatigue. Be gentle with yourself, take the time to be creative, to enjoy nature, to breathe, to have time for stillness and self-reflection.

Caring for children in their early years is incredibly important work, now more than ever. Children and their parents have increased fears, anxiety, and feelings of overwhelm. They all need to see the warmth and acceptance in your eyes, especially if you are wearing a mask. Like yourself, employers and supervisors have increased vigilance with cleanliness and sanitization, fears of spreading the virus through touch or the air. When we are attending to all these very critical physical aspects, we also need to remember the importance of warm presence, wonder, curiosity, and playfulness.

We will be using soft materials to speak to the need to be gentle and compassionate with ourselves and each other. We are going to make “beauty” out of all the torn and broken bits.

Some materials required – maximum of 25 participants

Stories: Bridges to Ourselves and Our World

We all as caregivers, educators, and family members have significant challenges:

• to use our opportunities with children, families, and others to assist in their learning, to expand their understanding
• to generate creative ideas and activities
• to keep children interested and engaged
• to honour the diversity of humanity

This workshop will use stories and storytelling to show you how one can begin to address these challenges in a positive and appealing way.

Storytelling Make n Take: some materials required – maximum 25 participants

Outdoor Play in the Early Years

Everything is possible outside – children are more physically active, the natural world enters through all the senses, community connections are made and emergent curriculum takes off! During this session, we will connect outdoor play to the Early Learning Framework, explore how outdoor play supports child development and give you practical places to start with loose parts, simple activities and inspiration!

Presenter Bios