Hi, I'm Mark. Before deciding to become a teacher, most of my experience with youth came from coaching. My undergrad was in physical education and coaching and offered me lots of practical work coaching and teaching youth aged 5-18.

I graduated teachers' college in 2015 from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. While in teachers' college, an opportunity to teach overseas in Egypt came up. 5 graduates from Laurier left Canada to teach in Egypt in August of 2015. I taught Grade 6 English at Dover, an American International School.

After Egypt, I was fortunate to get hired by the WRDSB in May of 2016, and have been supply teaching since. In September of 2017, I landed a .43 LTO for the full year teaching Grade 1 science and dance, as well as Grade 3-6 phys ed and dance.

Recently, I got on the LTO list for the WRDSB and I'm hoping to have a full 1.0 LTO in September of this year.

My experience with Grade 1 students is that it's a busy aged group and has its challenges, as well as its positive rewards. The one challenging aspect is the short attention span of early learners. One reward of being a Grade 1 teacher is I get to have a positive influence over these early learners first experiences with school.

I'm Looking forward to learning more about primary learners in this course and how I can improve my own pedagogy. I'm also excited to learn from the other teachers taking this primary ABQ.

Cheers,

Mark