Twenty-six Grade 6 students at Canmore’s Lawrence Grassi Middle School were given the assignment: Integration of Social Studies and English Language Arts.
The students were asked to engage in a local project in order to make a difference in the community, with students choosing on their own accord Bow Valley SPCA.
“The students were asked to write narrative stories, adding real or imaginary details, while working on some grammar concepts,” said Lawrence Grassi teacher Nadine Trottier.
Joseph Potts, a volunteer from Bow Valley SPCA, visited the class and told the students about some of the dogs and cats that have been rescued by the organization.
“In almost every case, the history of the cats and dogs before being cared for by the SPCA is unknown. In some cases, the people who have adopted a dog or cat move away from the community. In either case, imagining the details about a dog’s or cat’s life requires creativity and empathy,” Trottier explained.
The SPCA stories Potts told students generated a hook to start writing their own stories. “In 21st century education, we often talk about the importance of engaging students into worthwhile tasks and have an authentic audience for them to share their work. By agreeing to post my students’ stories onto the SPCA website, my students now feel they are writing for a real audience and purpose,” Trottier said.
“This is the first time that we have tried this kind of a project,” Potts said. “Nadine mentioned that she wanted to do a project and that her kids had voted for the SPCA as the organization they wanted to do it with and the whole idea was to improve their language skills and be involved in a project that had some social meaning in the community.”
Potts was invited to the school where he related stories of the dogs and cats they have had and sheltered. “Then what they did was take some of those stories and a couple of other animals that they knew about being rescued and what they did is invent the backstory for each of the dogs and cats or they invented the future story or the current situation.”
Potts says he was moved by the thought and empathy each student put into fictional stories relating to the animals lives.
“They started to create these stories and what I committed to was putting them up on our website and posting them to Facebook so that people could see what are extremely sweet stories and quite inventive,” Potts said.
“I was actually touched when I read these stories; I could feel tears in my eyes on a couple of them, but what was so cool about them is if you look at these, the kids are doing exactly what any rescue organization would love to have people do, which is show the empathy that they feel for these animals.
“Because they tell a story in the first person it’s really quite touching to see how they can identify with what the struggles might have been or their inventive struggles.”
Visit Bow Valley SPCA’s blog section at, www.bowvalleyspca.org where the student’s stories have been posted.
One of the student stories:
Hello my name is Belle and if I could talk this is my story. I ran away from my family when I saw a cute little bunny. My owner’s hadn’t fed me in a while. I jumped the fence and chased it for a long time. I never caught it though. Well I was lost and I had nowhere to go, so I wandered the streets of Banff, until an elderly man spotted me on his morning stroll to the grocery store. He phoned the Bylaw. The Banff Bylaw came and picked me up. They took me to Canmore to the Bow Valley SPCA. I lived there for almost three years. I didn’t really like other dogs as I was aggressive towards them. But I love kids and adults that treat me well. The volunteers at the SPCA worked with me for hundreds of hours (even thousands). And I finally learned that dogs can be nice. I then became accustomed to being around other dogs. Then I got interviewed from a Bull Mastiff rescue in the U.S. They thought I was wonderfully trained (Because I was on my best behaviour). They believed to adopt me. Now I am with a lovely owner named Kirk. We have been together for many years and I love him.
