I believe in the potential of every child to learn in their own capacity! I am the General Manager of Bright Eyes Academy, which allows me to work with all of the children from 0-12 years old. I genuinely enjoy working with all of the children that come to Bright Eyes and love collaborating with our wonderful teaching family.
A little bit about me
I live in Langley with my Husband Clayton and our two cats Gibson and Kaiya. I have lived in the Lower Mainland all of my life and have been part of many different associations through hockey, baseball, and dance. My parents and younger brother live five minutes from our house and we often get together with one another! It has been important to me to have strong connections with my family may it be my first, second or third cousins, my Aunts or Uncles! I love spending time with all of them. Some of my interests include music, photography. I am fairly new to photography but I am amazed at how beautiful some of the photos you are able to capture in a single moment.
Me and Childcare
I have always had a passion for children, coming from a large family there was always someone that was younger then me that I was able to take care of and look after. It seemed natural to me to go into a field in which I would be surrounded by children everyday. The first avenue I took was schooling to be an elementary school teacher, I volunteered at a local elementary school 3 days a week for a whole school year and realized that the school system was not for me, there seemed to be too much structure for these small children. I took a hiatus from school for a little bit because all I had ever wanted to be was a teacher and it turned out that it wasn’t going to work for me. I thought long and hard about what else I could do with children and the next step was to be a preschool teacher. I started going to school for my Early Childhood Education certificate and within a minute of being in the classroom I knew that this is what I was meant to do!
I was always interested in the psychology of children, how they developed and how each child was different and had a different way of learning. By the end of my basic training for ECE I had learned a lot about the way children develop and even more importantly to me how as an educator, how I could effectively help children develop everyday skills, coping skills and creativity.
Having the opportunity to learn about the Reggio Approach to teaching was instrumental in me wanting to find a center that implemented the Reggio Philosophy. The children become the leaders in the classroom, the educators go where the children’s interest take them, the educators collaborate with the children and their team mates to come up with new innovative ways to teach the children and to expose them to as many new experiences as possible.
I see the great benefit that a child being able to make mistakes explore their world, think for themselves and really at the end of the day just being able to be a child has. Not only do the children have the opportunity to come to school each day and learn about whatever they are interested in for as long as they are interested in it, but we as educators are able to learn about things that we might never have learned about before or had the desire to learn about before, but the children’s enthusiasm and drive to learn as much as they can and create many different projects surrounding the topic drives the educator to want to bring in interesting objects for the children to use and explore. One of my most memorable topics that I explored with children was my construction topic that I did with our preschool children. The children brought this idea to us when one of the little girls was having renovations done in her house, we explored different materials that were used during construction and then we made 2D and 3D projects. We ended off by making our very own bird houses out of real wood and nails with hammers. The children wanted to keep learning about this topic for 2 months and the possibilities of this topic became endless.
I believe that an educator coming into a classroom with no preconceived idea about what the children are going to want to learn about or what the children are going to want to explore allows the educator to be opened to every possibility. There are very few times that I hear the word no come out of our teachers mouths at work we take the ‘why not try it’ approach. I believe in taking a risk and doing things that may make you feel a little bit uncomfortable and letting yourself be vulnerable to the situation, and to never be afraid of getting your hands dirty! Children really do have “100 Languages” that they should be allowed to explore.