Three Places I Find Connection

My Home

Starting in my home my favourite place for building connections and connecting with others is my kitchen. Reading through classmates posts this seems to be a common thread. For me the kitchen and food represent family and friends coming together and sharing meals and conversation. Time spent cooking with family, the stories and laughter shared as we cook and eat together. The act of sharing a meal together connects people, food us a connector the scent draws people in and invite you to sit down. We sit together and connect meals are a way to share hospitality, show people we care and are thinking of their comfort. Food has also been a way my family has shown care to members of our community in times of need, making and delivering meals or banana bread.  

My community

My community connections are shifting right now and have been for the past three years.  Prior to the events of 2020 I was a competitive adult highland dancer and found my connection to a broader community through competing and traveling to events throughout BC and Washington state. Those two- and a-bit years of not being able to perform and compete disrupted my major source of connection to a large community made up of people of diverse ages, backgrounds and genders.  I have found myself searching for the same feeling of community since the events of 2020 and feeling untethered and unanchored. I miss the friends I made that have now scattered across the globe. Now as my husband  and I are expecting our first child in early July I am begging to look for new connections, to other moms and moms of children who will be around the same age as my baby. Our community connections shift as our lives change and we move from one phase of our lives to another. Right now I am in a transition phase and my connection to the community is changing as my life changes.

Global Connections

My global connections come from connecting with family in the UK. My husband’s extended family is in the London and Brighton areas and we talk to his cousins regularly although we haven’t had the opportunity to go see them since summer of 2019, we are hoping to go in a year and take our baby to meet the extended family there.  I enjoy my regular What’s App conversations with the cousins in the UK and connecting with two in particular who are also teachers, we all teach the same age group and it’s always interesting to see how similar our stories are despite being on different continents, 9-year-olds are pretty similar in BC and the UK.

Professional Essence

I currently teach grade 4 at a large K-5 school in Langley BC, working as part of a fantastic team of three grade 4 teachers. This is my fifth-year teaching grade 4 and my eighth year in the classroom. This is my third and final course of my GDE before I move on to my PME having previously completed my post graduate certificate in Mathematics Education through Queen’s in 2022. I am excited to be continuing my journey as an educator through Queen’s and am eager to apply my evolving knowledge and practice to my classroom. My focus is on Math and how we can make math and number sense playful, collaborative and connected. As an educator I am constantly learning and growing alongside my students as well as learning from them. My current class of 30 students is a very diverse group with a significant number of students having IEPs or requiring additional supports to be successful.  As an educator I believe that every student is a vital part of our classroom community and that each brings something unique and important to share with us, it is my role to help them see the best in themselves and each other. My classroom philosophy revolves around four words, wonder, thinking, connection and play. With the belief that my words are all intertwined  and  directly related to building our positive classroom community.