Team 3C: About Mrs. Milson

I decided that I wanted to be a teacher when I was in Grade Two in Mrs. Kolmaticky's class. She was the greatest! I loved going to school every day to see her AND our classroom zoo! We had a fish tank, hamsters, a rabbit, a beehive in the window and a massive chicken wire cube in the middle of the room that held a couple of breeding pairs of doves! Her cat came to visit every Friday and her husband built us a reading loft complete with a rope ladder, a white picket fence and the most comfortable pillows! It was an unreal learning environment and I loved it! It was at that time that I started teaching my Cabbage Patch Dolls how to read and write...and the rest is history!

I grew up in Edmonton and went to the U of A, graduating in 1998 with my Bachelor of Education degree. I started teaching a few months later in a tiny town named Winfield, in the Wetaskiwin Regional School Division. I had a classroom of 12-15 students from grades one to six. They had various learning challenges and my primary focus was teaching Language Arts and Math. I loved this challenging first assignment and stayed in that position until the summer of 2002. Driving 100km each way to work every day was taking its toll on me and my poor car and a new special education position was opening up at Robina Baker. I was lucky enough to be hired at RBES to start the new AAP class in September 2002! I have been at RBES ever since and have had a variety of teaching positions in special education, grade one, three and four. I am a very proud member of the RBES family and love teaching in the community that I live in!

Starting my career focused on teaching literacy and numeracy to students who struggled to learn using the traditional methods, inspired me to build up my skill set and tool box in these areas. Literacy and numeracy continue to be areas that I am extremely passionate about and I am always looking for new and better ways to meet my students' needs. I love teaching Grade Three for so many reasons! The curriculum in the third grade is so interesting to the students, especially in Science and Social Studies! I also love this age of student because they are young enough to still enjoy the wonder and magic of new learning situations but old enough to be able to discuss and understand some deeper topics.

I live in Devon with my husband, Norman, our two boys, Elliot (grade 8) and Stuart (grade 5) and our pets (an Australian Labradoodle and a Crested Gecko). As a family, we enjoy time outdoors, bird and wildlife watching, camping, reading, going to the movies and spending our summers on the coast.