Rayleigh Elementary Students Share Songs and Compassion with Seniors on Valentine’s Day

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Story provided by Chelsea Isenor, Director of Communications and Board Administration

This Valentine’s Day students from Rayleigh Elementary are living the District value of Relationships and Connections by sharing songs, stories, and compassion with people of all ages.

On February 14, 2025, Ms. Jasmine Rempel’s Grade 2/3 class and Ms. Christy Gauley’s Grade 6/7 class visited The Shores Retirement Residence to share songs and stories, creating cross generational connections with seniors.

As a school, Rayleigh Elementary’s core values include belonging and compassion. These two classes are “buddy classes” who meet once a week to read and play games together, which is part of the larger school goal to increase all students’ sense of belonging and build compassion and understanding between ages.

When thinking of ways to extend their compassion project beyond the school, Mrs. Rempel and Ms. Gauley had an idea to involve more “buddies” of different ages, so they reached out to The Shores Retirement Residence to set up a visit on Valentine’s Day.

The students performed two songs for their new senior friends. The first song was called ‘You Are Enough’ and shared a message about believing in yourself even when life is challenging.

The second song was a favourite of the teachers, students, and seniors, ‘What a Wonderful World.’ Before singing the song, students were asked to share what they think makes the world so wonderful. One student responded, “I think the world is wonderful because people are kind,” while other students shared that “family and friends” and “delicious food” make the world wonderful.

After sharing their songs, the students handed out Valentine's Day cards and letters to the seniors. Throughout the room, students and seniors were creating meaningful connections by listening to each other's stories and learning new things about each other’s interests and lives.  

When asked why this was an important experience for students, Ms. Gauley shared, “One of our main school goals is to build a sense of belonging and one of the tools to do that is to increase our skills and capacity for compassion, which is part of what we do in our buddy classes… It made a lot of sense to take our core value of building compassion within our classes and our school outward into the community. [The students] really love it because this gives them a chance to have a more experienced ear to listen to some of their challenges and joys…all together it is just a great way of building understanding of who we are as humans.”