Coleen Berg

I am outgoing, funny, and caring! I work at Neilson Grove in the preschool, kindercare, and out of school care programs and I have my ECCE certificate.

A little bit about me: My husband Chris and I have been married for little over 1 year and we live with our 20 year old cat Kitty and our new puppy Lola. I was raised by both my Mom and my Grandmother and I am an only child. I live in North Delta but I am trying to convince Chris to move to Ladner because I love it here. In 2004 Chris and I lived in England and worked as aupairs for a family in Liverpool and we also worked in the family’s Restaurant/Pub. While working in England we travelled to 8 different European countries and saw amazing sites and met wonderful people. I am a big crafter! I love making cards, gift packaging and scrapbooks. I also enjoy making felt stories and resources that can be used in the classroom.

Me and Childcare: I have the opportunity to work with a wide range of ages at Bright Eyes at Nielson Grove, I really love how each age is so different and all the different qualities and dynamics that each child brings into the classroom. I love the wonder and curiosity of a preschooler, their excitement as they explore their world is amazing. I get the opportunity to watch the children as they change from a 3 year old into 5 years old and start attending the “Big School”. Kindergarteners are so creative and silly-always with jokes to tell as they start to discover their humour. School aged children have completely developed personalities, their imagination and ability to pretend play and create games wows me everyday!

I love the Reggio Approach to education because it is centered on the interests of the children. Just as adults excel when learning about something they are interested in, the same goes for children. I believe children have so much potential, and they are not always given the experiences to realize this potential. With the Reggio approach children are encouraged to hypothesize, think critically, problem solve, test, create, and collaborate. Thus the potential for each program in the centre is limitless. The most interesting project I have worked on with the children started with a paper airplane. The children have so much fun flying paper airplanes outside that they wanted to make them all the time. This led the teaching team into bringing in books about how to create different types of paper airplanes; the children had a great time testing them out to see which ones flew the best. The teaching team thought was that the children were interested in aviation so we brought many different things to the table to see if this would spark anymore interest and after failed attempts we went to the children again. After talking to the children we realized that their interest was not so much the planes but the folding of the paper into “things”. This sparked our topic of origami. It was great fun to learn along with the children how to create different 3D objects out of paper!

Conclusion: As my example of a favourite topic goes to show, children think in ways that may be very different then an adult. I feel that it is so important to listen to what the children are trying to tell you, really listen to their conversations with both you and their peers, you never know when you might come across something amazing to discover with the children!