Still Me!

Joanne Sleightholm has been a kindergarten teacher for over 25 years and brings to this website all her enthusiasm and love of teaching 3-5 year olds!! She worked for the Toronto District School Board and taught mostly Junior and Senior Kindergarten. Joanne now is a mentor for teachers from Kindergarten to Grade eight and has helped many teachers with their programs and classroom management. Joanne has her Specialist is Special Education and has acted as a Special Education consultant, an itinerant behavioural teacher and a teacher of a diagnostic intermediate behavioural class.

As well as being a full time teacher up until June 2000 (when she left the classroom to become a private teacher consultant), Joanne is a musician (flute player and guitar player), an actor, a puppeteer, a magician, a singer, an artist, a music manager and promoter, a mother of 4 wonderful children and the wife of a very supportive husband!! As of January 2005, Joanne became a grandma to a sweet darling grandson. Joanne is currently working for the Toronto District School Board on a contract helping new teachers and special education teachers.

In 2000, Joanne was a recipient of the Prime Minister's Award of Achievement for Teacher Excellence and in 1999 received The TVOntario Teacher's Award of Merit for Teaching Excellence. Joanne was also nominated for The Toronto Sun Teacher of the Year Award in 2000. In 2003 and 2004, Joanne was nominated for the Fred Bartlett Award for teachers who have contributed greatly to education in Ontario. It is her dream to be able to share the award-winning techniques with other teachers everywhere in an endeavour to help all children and teachers reach their goals and their potential.

Joanne started giving seminars in Toronto and surrounding cities to Early Childhood Education Teachers and continues to give workshops and lectures at faculties of education and school boards. (See section on Workshops for more details). Joanne is now an international speaker and is taking her methods and ideas across Canada and United States. Watch the news page of her site regularly for one of her renowned "living room" workshops, where Joanne spends a morning over coffee with a handful of eager teachers and sends them back to their classrooms with a load of new inspiring ideas!

Her intention for this site is multi-fold. As the website develops, she will be adding more pages to make the site as helpful as it can possibly be to all teachers of kindergarten age children. Joanne has researched many wonderful links which are on the links page.

She planned to have one kindergarten a month as the feature kindergarten and will be asking you to email her if you think that you would like to participate in this. (She will post pictures and ideas from different classes each month). It has been difficult to keep up this page, as Joanne has found it difficult to find teachers who want to be part of this page. Please please, consider volunteering your class for this as it will make the site even more fun for other teachers to share ideas

The messageboard is a place where you can state an idea or a problem and "kinderteachers" worldwide will be there to answer. !

Teachers can learn from each other!!! Everyone knows that it is sometimes easier to solve other people's problems than our own!!

So ……welcome to www.kindergartenconsultant.com! I hope that this site will grow to be one of your favourite places to visit… be sure to bookmark this site now and come back lots… there is a lot more stuff to come!!!!!!!

Hmmmm…how about good report card ideas, newsletter samples, how to run a playday, or a class party, trip ideas galore……..forward this site to all your kindergarten teacher friends! You can email Joanne at joanne@kindergartenconsultant.com or post messages on the message board.