Our March Professional Development days last week provided our staff with a wonderful opportunity to all come together at the same time to learn and engage with each other. We focused on bringing much needed training on policies and procedures to our staff. We had a large focus on the Health, Wellness, and Safety of all members of our community as well as the Student Support training. This policy will be available soon on our website so look for it. All staff also had the opportunity to deep clean and organize in their classrooms and prepare curriculum and end of year items for the remainder of the school year.
Our priority task was sharing our new Risk Management Policy with the staff. We continued with Part B of our Creating A Culture of Safety: Child Abuse Prevention in-service training. Infant and Toddler staff learned more about using sign language in their classrooms. All other teaching staff had training on new Student Support observation forms.
All of us benefited from training from Nurse Jen who switched roles with our teachers and stepped into the educator role to provide training on medical response protocols during our PD days. We started off discussing the staff and student Incident/Accident forms and how to assess for concussion symptoms and continuing to observe for new or worsening symptoms.
We went through the classroom emergency backpacks and discussed the purpose of each of the first aid items and how to use them. Nurse Jen provided a demonstration of how to provide first aid for wounds before having everyone partner up to participate in a scenario where everyone had a chance to wrap each other’s wounds. We also discussed participation in the Stop The Bleed training as part of our CPR and First Aid training requirements.
Nurse Jen wrapped up her training sessions with our extended day and new teachers to review Medical Action and Support Plans and provided training for how to respond to situations such as Asthma, Anaphylaxis, and Epilepsy in the school setting.
During these days we also enjoyed some service project work. Outside we started garden bed preparation, turning over the soil and planting flowers and early vegetables. We also contributed completed fleece blankets for Project Linus.