Residential Residential

LESSON PLAN
BEFORE (ACTIVATION):
1. Invite students to re-visit their Thinking Journal ideas back from Lesson 2.1 Shi-shi-etko
where they listed possible impacts on children being taken to Residential Schools
(or consult the whole-class anchor chart).
2. Explain: Now that we’ve briefly heard from some Indian Residential School survivors
(we watched about 8 minutes of the video in Lesson 3.2 A Day at Indian Residential
Schools), how has our understanding of these impacts deepened?
3. Give students a blank Cause and Consequence organizer and ask them to put “Living at
Residential School from age 4 to 18” as the cause. Together discuss and add students’
ideas to the Consequences side of the chart based on the previous lesson and model
what the difference between short-term and long-term is.
E.g., possible consequences so far might be: children know a trade (long-term);
children lose their language (long-term); children don’t get to know their siblings
very well (long-term); children are always tired (short-term); children are always
hungry (short-term)
4. Show students the remainder of the A Day at Indian Residential Schools in Canada DVD
(about 17 minutes left on the video), and establish their purpose for watching: What
short-term and long-term consequences do these survivors identify?
5. When finished, discuss and add ideas to the Cause and Consequence organizer. (Either
individually first and then whole-class, or whole-class.) Here are ideas mentioned
specifically in the DVD:
SHORT-TERM CONSEQUENCES
LONG-TERM CONSEQUENCES
• lack of food = always hungry
• poor quality of food - no meat =
undernourished
• only 2 hours of actual school =
falling behind in education
• early day, working several hours =
tired and exhausted
• not enough food so fight others for
scraps = hard to make friends
• no hugs or love = loneliness
• chopped hair = lose culture
• not allowed to speak own language =
lose culture
• overall tough living conditions =
early deaths for some children
• lonely, loss of language, insufficient
teaching/learning time = low
graduation rates [the DVD mentions
the low graduation rates and then
summarizes the causes]
• free menial labour (First Nation people
became servants because of their skills,
but due to lack of money sense, etc…
were taken advantage of)
• no hugs or love = poor parenting
skills, don’t know how to hug their
own kids
• don’t go home for summer break = lose
connection with parents
• five generations of children at
Residential Schools = five generations
of broken communities, people
without good parenting skills
• lose language, lose connection to
parents and community = culture loss
• children come home broken = misuse
of alcohol
100