A decade ago, if you told me my career today would revolve around children’s education and parenting, I would have laughed in your face. I didn’t even know if I wanted to have kids of my own, nevermind re-arrange my whole life to accommodate them. I was career-driven, independent and had personal and professional goals for myself that just didn’t line up with having a family. By the age of 30 I already had 18 years of experience under my belt in the fashion and beauty industry. Yep, you read that right. At 12 my mom would take me along with her to seasonal jobs with designer fragrance brands, putting me to work and paying me cash under the table. I had a well-rounded understanding of customer service from a young age, and with that quickly picked up on communication skills, having to learn to sell high-end products to adults while essentially I was still a child.

Having ‘mature’ conversations didn’t phase me. I had already known what it was like to not be able to connect with students my own age in school.

In third grade, the Canadian standard EQAO testing sorted me into the ‘gifted’ category. I remember touring the school they had recommended for me to attend. It all seemed so mechanical. The classrooms felt like libraries. The quiet was eerie. Students sat with their heads down, focused on their own work. No one looked up at me to say hello. I knew I could find a path here, I mean, I played with calculators over game consoles. But honestly, what 9 year old wants to leave a group of childhood friends for a library? I begged my parents to let me stay where I was. Friends were priority then.

As luck and life would have it, nearly a year and a half later I left those childhood friends when my family relocated for my dad’s work to Windsor, Ontario. Immediately, I realized it was not going to be as easy to make new friends as I thought. Being the new kid from ‘Toronto’ was bad enough, the fact that I was top of the class in grades made it that much worse. I wasn’t accepted by the 5th graders, and I definitely didn’t fit in with the 6th graders when the teachers decided it would be beneficial to bump me up a grade. Within weeks of this adjustment, following IQ testing with a child psychologist, I was finally sent off to a school that offered the PACE program (Program for Academic and Creative Excellence). Here I no longer felt ‘different’. I didn’t feel ashamed to be ‘smart’. In fact, I learned more about diversity and discovering unique individual talents here than I have in any other situation I have come across in my life. I always assumed that by being gifted, teachers were trying to sort me into a box. In this program, I discovered that the box didn’t exist. We were all there for different reasons. Some students excelled in mathematics and problem solving, others in creative arts or music. And we were all gifted. It was our differences, and how the teachers acknowledged, celebrated, and adapted our education to those differences, that allowed each student to flourish in their own way.

Highschool was a wake-up call. Yes, there were subjects that I excelled in. I had been a straight A student my entire life. But it was at this stage where the gap between teaching styles and learning styles were driven apart. Far, far apart. I had spent years now being taught in a way that some would call unconventional. In the PACE program I learned through play. The approach was hands-on and allowed creative expression to understand and learn. We were provided real-life experiences. Want to know about anatomy and reproduction? We bred guinea pigs in our classroom. Expression through music? Here’s a guitar, or some drumsticks. Try to keep up to the beat. Textbooks? What were those? Math class situated around a single real-life problem projected on the board at the front of the room. Once you figured out the answer, you were done class for the day. It was the transition to high-school where I began to fall-behind, specifically in mathematics and science. My learning style didn’t jive with reading a textbook. That just wasn’t how I had been accustomed to understanding what I was being taught. I’ve always been a visual learner. I could read the same paragraph over 10 times and not retain it, and yet here I was being shown literary teaching styles, with expectations beyond what I could return as a student. The most challenging part? Whether it be on their will or that of the overall curriculum, I realized teachers didn’t change and students were expected to adapt. Wouldn’t we all be more successful if we could understand each other’s learning styles so that we can communicate best and share our successes? Like love languages, but for students (and let’s face it, as adults we are still learning everyday as well).

This approach to learning has stuck with me throughout my life, as a peer, manager and now as a mother. I started Sensory Kids Play! at a time in my life when time was not on my side. I had a 4 month old and a 20 month old, and I was in survival mode. I knew my toddler was at the phase in her growth where she was becoming a sponge, taking in everything around her and learning at incredible speeds. I knew what I wanted to teach her, and yet I also was well aware that one on one time for the two of us was rare, and would be for a while. I was okay with screen time - it helped me to nurse my baby, cook meals and get the dishes done when nothing else would do - but I wasn’t comfortable with what she was watching. She begged for ‘toys’. “But you have toys, you have plenty of toys”. The channels she was drawn to featured toys with silly sounds and actions - fun, but where was the education layer? What was she really learning? I sat down and watched along with her. “I can do that”, I thought. And I could do it in a way where my daughter could learn, and not just learn - excel. In a matter of days, Sensory Kids Play! was born. What started as controlled content for my own little one - filming during naptimes and editing after the kids went to bed - quickly grew to a full-fledged beautiful community of parents and children alike, looking for valuable, educational content that they can feel good about watching. The way this channel has been embraced has been nothing short of absolutely heartwarming for me, but the biggest reward is watching my daughter, while she creates, paints or plays with her own toys, not only repeating, but understanding the learning through play that she saw on ‘mommy’s movies’. Of course, I’m quickly brought back to earth when she voices her opinion for not liking content or wanting to change the channel. There is plenty of content left on the cutting room floor because of that kid.

And now, here I am expanding my community further to parents that just want to figure out how to be the best damn role models they can be. How to maximize on those moments that we have with our children, even when they are few and far between, and how to make valuable impacts on the little humans our kids are quickly growing up to be. So as much as this is My Story, it’s really our story - as parents, relatives and guardians. Because whether we are the one’s teaching, or the one’s learning (and spoiler alert: we are always both), we are all gifted.

MG