Thanks to a team of grade 7 and 8 students, École St-Denis will soon have four new buddy benches.
The idea is that if a student sits on a buddy bench (or banc de l’amité, en français), they’re signalling to their peers that they’re looking for someone to play with.
“It’s an area that they could go sit, and it's like a sign for other students that person would like to play,” said École St-Denis special education teacher Mia MacDonald.
“So I'm going to see that and I'm gonna go up to them and say ‘Would you like to play with me?’”
She said that students may sometimes feel lonely or excluded by their peers, and some may not know how to interact with other children. This is especially true for MacDonald’s special education students, who have a harder time communicating.
“With the unveiling, we're going to help raise awareness and educate them as to why we're putting that in the school yard,” MacDonald said.
“I don't just want to put the bench outside and then nobody knows what to do with it. So it's definitely important to educate them as to why we've decided to have this bench in our school yard. So the reason behind it, how to use it.”
MacDonald said she’s taking the principal’s training course, and as part of the course, she’s supposed to think of a topic to integrate into the school’s action plan for the year.
She decided to focus on student well-being, and came up with the idea of buddy benches when reading a book about the initiative to one of her own children.
“I just figured, ‘Oh, my goodness, like this is such a fun kind of project to do,’” MacDonald said.
There were even already four (plain, unpainted) benches in the schoolyard.
Working with St-Denis art teacher Sylvain Prévost, a group of grade 7 and 8 students at the school drew up designs and are now in the process of decorating the benches.
The students have also signed their names on the benches so they’ll have a legacy at École St-Denis, even after they’ve moved onto high school and beyond.
The only bench that has been completed to date (although it hasn’t yet been installed in the schoolyard) features a multi-coloured design, while another that’s in progress features an environmental theme.
Grade 8 student Anella Zembrycki, a member of the group that worked on the benches, said she thinks the buddy bench is a really good idea.
“Little kids don't always know how to go in groups and find friends,” she said. “So it's a good way to help them make friends for a lifetime.”
Amélia Lefebvre, also in Grade 8, said she thinks the initiative could have been helpful when she was younger.
“Like, we're playing catch or something, and somebody excludes me, and I'm gonna feel lonely,” she said. “I think definitely the buddy bench would help me …
“I think it sends a great message to especially younger kids when they're learning. They know that people aren't always accepted and stuff like that.
“So if they're going through their own problems, thinking, ‘Oh, they're not accepted, they're lonely,’ they'll see that other people also feel the same.”
