With National Truth and Reconciliation Day this weekend, some are taking the opportunity to remind those youngest about the past.

That includes Pleasantdale School, which held Orange Shirt Day on Wednesday, to recognize the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis history in Canada.

Principal Michelle Smart details how they've been observing that all week.

"All week actually we've been having lots of different classroom activities and classroom discussions and yesterday was our orange shirt day. So we all wore our orange shirts and got together in the afternoon in an assembly run by our student leadership team. We talked about how schools should feel for all children and in contrast to how our school feels to what the residential school student's experiences were."

"Then we worked in our buddy groups and we each had a paper feather to write down how we hope that children feel in school. Then we put them on the bulletin board, what we call our dog pound in the lobby of our school. We did that and we watched the video and took our picture with us together in our shirts."

Smart says that having those conversations with students helps make a better future.

"I just feel like our students are so lucky to be having these conversations. They're not conversations about mistakes that we've made, but conversations about mistakes that were made in the past and we have this opportunity to move forward in a building and accepting way and working together to have a better future and what more could we ask?" 

She hopes those students go forward learning something from the week's activities.

"I think they feel positive. I feel like they have had the opportunity to be talking about these things and considering these things and, you know, looking forward to learning about things that they can do," said Smart, "It's really about being accepting of differences and you know, just learning about each other and being able to work together. We're more similar than we think. Sometimes we think are very different, but we really have a lot of similarities. 

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