On November 13th, Noelle Pepin joined our class and introduced the idea behind her beaded tweets project within School District #57. This experience was not only creative but the idea of bringing a traditional Indigenous practice, like beading into the modern classroom is very cool.
This project touches on many of the First People Principles of Learning and is a great way to discuss and incorporate this framework into a lesson/discussion with your students. Personally for me, this activity touched on the following FPPL:
1- Learning involves patience and time: for me the idea of slowing adding the beads onto the twine, one by one in a structured way according to the code required patience.
2-Learning requires exploration of one’s ideas and identity: choosing the one word that represented JOY required self-reflection, as well as choosing which coloured beads I wanted to represent me and my daughters keychain required intentional thought.
3-Learning recognizes the role of Indigenous knowledge: Beading has been a beautiful and expressive technique of Indigenous culture for a long time, bringing people together through connections and story.
We were given a variety of beads to build our own bracelets that represented a word that brought us joy. Personally, I chose FAMILY, as my husband and three kids bring me the most joy on a daily basis. I also made another smaller keychain for my daughter that said SKATE, as her sport is figure skating. This activity brought me a lot of joy as I got to work with my hands and be creative-two things that I love! Figuring out the coding aspect to the two words I chose was also new and exciting for me. I definitely realized that the more in depth and complicated coding structures (building sentences) would be much more difficult and require a lot more patience. I think this idea of bringing ADST, Art and FPPL together to create something kids can be proud of is an amazing idea and something that I will definitely keep in mind once I am in the classroom. I love that you can adapt this activity to various grade levels so that it is accessible to all students.
For more information on Noelle Pepin, Beaded Tweets : https://twitter.com/Beaded_Tweets
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