The first time I remember ever being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I said I wanted to be a teacher, but I didn’t really know what it meant to be a teacher at that age. It wasn’t until my second year of high school where I created the group “Get To Know Your Techno” with my village youth worker, when I realised teaching was my calling. Me and fellow classmates invited elderly people from the local community into the school one evening a month and offered free of charge to teach them how to use their mobile phones. As the idea grew it slowly became more than mobile phones and people started coming of all ages to be taught about their digital cameras, televisions, Nintendo Wii, laptops, how to use ebay and some people just came for a chat. After a couple of years we were put up for – and won – an award and there is more information about what I did in the following video.

Essentially, I went home every night from “Get To Know Your Techno” with a buzz, knowing I’d helped people learn something they didn’t know before which could potentially change their lives. For example I taught and elderly lady with no family to use her new mobile phone to call her cousin in Australia. I knew from then, that I wanted to do this full time and teaching was definitely the job for me. Going with this I spent all my spare time helping at kids after school groups, running brownies and girl guides and youth work and then carrying this on, whilst doing my HNC in Early Education and Childcare.

My work in the nursery got me here today

Last year I worked as an early years practitioner for a year and I became a hard working, caring practitioner who seemed to spend all her spare time preparing activities and looking for new teaching ideas to make the nursery a place of learning in fun ways rather than just reading the children a book where they aren’t engaging or listening or taking them outside to play with a football and getting bored easily which I’d seen in previous practice. Essentially, that’s the kind of practitioner/teacher I want to keep being. I always want to be looking for new ideas to make the classroom engaging and to find fun activities rather than have the children copy off the board or do maths sums out of a book.