Welcome to The Backyard Teacher blog!
Hello, thanks for dropping by to read my blog – I’m so glad you’re here. Whether you’re an Early Childhood Educator or a Primary/Elementary school teacher, I hope we can work together to make your teaching life a little easier.
Now, a little bit about how I came to be writing for you right now…
I’m Early Childhood trained, and I’ve also worked in Primary/Elementary schools with Kindergarten to Year/Grade 4. I found teaching to be amazingly fulfilling and incredibly stressful in equal measures, and at the same time! I felt overwhelmed most of the time, and barely able to keep up with all the nonsense that teachers these days have to deal with. My catch-cry became, ‘Just let me teach!’
With all the demands and expectations on teachers and educators, the priority is shifting further and further away from what I see as our core business – the education and care of our kids. We face conflicting pressures from all directions – from the executive level, from supervising staff, from parents, from the data, and let’s face it, from OURSELVES!
We try so hard to be the best teachers we can be!
My own passion lies in literacy education and development, and believe me, I busted my butt every day to improve the outcomes for my kids. Many improved, some greatly, but to my genuine distress, many floundered below age and stage expectations. My nights and weekends were full of reading about pedagogy, listening to podcasts, browsing Pinterest and the web for just one more activity, one more strategy that I could implement to reach those struggling kids.
I had no social life, my own family complained that I seemed more interested in my school kids than them, and I felt torn in two most of the time.
Then, Covid hit and the world went a little crazy. I resigned my job, took up studying again and learned as much as I could about how kids learn and how we can best teach them to read and write. In fact, I’m STILL learning.
I’m here to share that knowledge with you and as many other teachers as I can, with the dream of making the world a more literate place, one small reader at a time. If you think that sounds like something you’re into, then I hope you’ll come along with me for the ride.
If it’s ok with you, I’ll be popping into your inbox regularly with information, advice, tips and resources to help you navigate your teaching path more easily, while improving outcomes for your kids.
In the meantime, leave a comment and tell me about your own teaching journey – I would really love to hear it!
