Growing up in home daycare had a significant impact on my career path. I learned my first and most valued lessons of how to provide exceptional care to young children along side my mother. I furthered my education at Southern Connecticut State University where I earned a B.S. in Early Childhood Education and a certificate to teach pre-kindergarten through grade 6. I have since earned a Master's Degree in Early Childhood Education from the University of Phoenix. I have been teaching young children in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten over the past 27 years. Twenty-three of those years have been in the New Haven Public Schools.
My mission is to create a classroom environment that encourages young children to discover the world around them and is supportive of their families. I am excited about learning together with your preschooler and working collaboratively with you!
One of my passions is Monarch butterflies. Their populations can drastically vary in number due to cold temperatures, drought, and unproductive breeding conditions. In addition, illegal logging, fires, and unregulated ecotourism has caused deforestation in central Mexico. This has disrupted the Monarch's delicate microclimate where the entire population overwinters. Most recently, pesticides used by famers has wiped out their main food supply. Since less than 10% of Monarch caterpillars become butterflies, my family and I have collected eggs and caterpillars every summer for over sixteen years. We keep them safe from predators and provide them with a healthy crop of Milkweed until they emerge from their chrysalis'. I often bring caterpillars into my classroom for students of all ages to observe. It may be hard to believe that Monarch butterflies could be connected to our school's NASA focus but, in 2009, my class raised monarch's at the same time they were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) on the Atlantis space shuttle. We compared the rate of growth of the caterpillars and the effects of gravity (or no gravity) on their chrysalis' with the ones on the ISS. So cool!