Capital city’s first bilingual preschool to open this fall

DENISE RIDEOUT

Sitting on a colourful rug in a room full of building blocks, stuffed toys and colouring books, Geela Tagak plays with her two-year-old daughter Alannah, all the while telling her how to play the game.

Her instructions to Allanah are all in Inuktitut.

Come this fall, Tagak’s gentle way of teaching will be put to good use. She will be the Inuktitut teacher at a new preschool program — the first of its kind in Iqaluit.

The program, aimed at teaching four-year-olds the skills they need to enter kindergarten, will begin in September.

The new program is bilingual, with Tagak teaching the children Inuktitut two days a week and Sonja Meredith heading up the English classes.

“I will read books in Inuktitut and they will have booklets to take home,” Tagak says. “And they will do colouring of igloos and qamotiit.”

The preschool program is the brainchild of a local society, Tasiuqtigiit, made up of parents and community members who want to put together wellness and education programs for children.

The society’s name, “Tasiuqtigiit — Hand-in-Hand — Main dans la Main, is trilingual to reflect Iqaluit’s multicultural make-up. Three of the society’s five board members are Inuit.

Last September, the society hired Norma Jean Johnson to be its executive director and to develop a new childhood education program. When she came to Iqaluit, she was struck by the absence of a preschool program.

After working on educational programs for children for 18 years in southern Canada, Johnson knew first hand the benefits of preschool. “The jump start to school makes a real difference,” she said last week, sipping on a cup of coffee in Tasiuqtigiit’s family resource centre.

Earlier this year, Johnson approached Nunavut’s department of education about starting up the program, and it came through with the funding to get it going. The education department is now in the process of officially licencing the preschool.

As she sits in the resource centre’s kitchen, her three-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter playing in the nearby toy room, Johnson talks about her vision for the new program.

She said the preschool will run the length of a regular school year, with classes taking place just in the mornings. The English courses will run on Mondays and Wednesdays and Inuktitut on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Johnson is particularly keen on the Inuktitut lessons because she sees them as a way to help Inuit children learn their native language before they enter the school system.

“It breaks my heart to hear of children losing their first language just because there’s not enough programs in town,” she said.

The Inuktitut class can take 14 students, and another 14 can go into the English stream. Johnson said if there’s enough demand, the preschool might add afternoon classes.

The two soon-to-be teachers are now taking courses to get prepared for September. They’re studying early childhood education through distance education courses.

While Nunavut doesn’t require that preschool teachers have a diploma, Johnson said the new teachers wanted to get the extra training. “It’s important for them to see themselves as teachers and not as babysitters,” she said.

On top of her courses, Tagak is working on creating small Inuktitut books for her students. “I want to help children learn more Inuktitut,” said the 28-year-old, who is originally from Pond Inlet.

Over the summer, boxes of toys have been arriving and Tasiuqtigiit will soon start transforming the lower level of the duplex into a preschool. Some of the supplies arrived just two weeks ago, and Johnson has set up a play kitchen area and a dress-up area in one of the large rooms.

Later, they’ll add cultural items such as Inuit dolls and amautiit for the children to dress up in.

In addition to the preschool, Tasiuqtigiit is partnering up with another local group, the Kinguvatta Society, to introduce an Inuktitut-only daycare to Iqaluit. Right now, daycares in the capital city mainly operate in English.