Tracy Sims and Cheryl Yoworski | Education Teaching and Presenting Team in Full Day Kindergarten in Ontario
HiMama is improving learning outcomes for children zero to five. We support early childhood education because the sector is the most challenging teaching environment. Low wages, lack of professional development and long days; HiMama’s aim is to ease childcare management and support early childhood professionals.
The HiMama team firmly believes that early childhood professionals deserve to be celebrated and that recognition is important. Our Educator Spotlight is one way we are shining a light on the important and undervalued work of childcare professionals.
TRACY AND CHERYL’S JOURNEYS
We both were drawn to working with young children and have a passion for the early years. We know how important the beginning stages of school are for young children and we truly believe that we wanted to make a difference in their educational journey.
CHALLENGES IN EARLY EDUCATION
They reflected on three challenges they face in early learning environments:
- Time: One thing that is always a challenge is time. Whether it be enough time to spend with each child individually, enough time to fit everything into our day, or simply enough time to plan and organize together as a team!
- Professional Development: Professional development is a positive challenge for us every year. It challenges our thinking and encourages us to try new things that are research based in our practice. We choose one topic each year as a team to focus in on and make improvements (e.g., documentation, self-regulation, mathematics).
- Effective Teaching: The final challenge we face every year is that there is no formula to effective teaching. It is through professional dialogue and reflection that we adapt our programming to best support the needs of our students from day to day based on our observations.
WHAT COULD BE BETTER ABOUT YOUR WORK?
We wish that we had access to unlimited funding to support the purchasing of classroom resources and materials for both indoors and outdoor learning! We are creative in collecting found and recycled materials to use in our program and we are always brainstorming solutions to support us is accessing materials for our students learning.
JOY IN THE CLASSROOM
Watching our children grow and learn over the two years that we teach them is a really powerful part of our jobs. After two years with children and their families, we often find joy in the strength of the relationships that we build with them. We also work together as a teaching team to support other educators in their learning journey. We love presenting and sharing our thinking and research with other educators.
PARENT COMMUNICATION
Families are the foundation of children’s lives and our relationship with them supports us in collaborating to best support the needs and well being of each child. We foster strong relationships with our families through daily communication, spending time with them in our classroom, and by documenting their children’s learning to highlight the learning that is happening throughout their day with us.
TRACY AND CHERYL’S CAREER GOALS
We would love to continue our blog to share with educators what is happening in our classroom. We would also like to continue offering workshops and webinars to educators with a focus on a variety of topics that relate to the early years.
Do you have an educator you think should be in our Educator Spotlight? Contact us today and let us know!
