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Founder:

Sarah Etherington BA, MACTE, MEd

Sarah has an extensive background in alternative education.  She holds a Master of Education in Montessori Integrative Learning with a specialty in Garden-Based Education.  Sarah is also a trained Montessori teacher for children ages 2.5 - 12.  She also holds a degree in Outdoor Education and a BA in Sociology.  Sarah's real pride and joy is being the mother to four phenomenal children; Lucas, Hailey, Scarlet and Jesse. 

 

Sarah believes in honouring the individuality of children by nurturing their self-creation, independence, creativity and imagination.  She does so by following the interests and learning styles of each child individually while allowing learning to naturally unfold.  This way, children take their learning as far as their heart and minds desire- often much further than any teacher-imposed learning outcome would have enabled.  Her desire is to connect children to the Earth while igniting passion and a life-long love of learning.

 

Sarah has been teaching in a variety of settings for 18 years.  Prior to becoming a Montessori teacher, Sarah instructed for Outward Bound in South Africa where she lead adjudicated Zulu and Xhosa youth in the mountains for 21-day outdoor leadership excursions.  She has worked with ages 2.5 - 15 in different Montessori schools throughout Hawaii, California and British Columbia, Canada.  In addition to teaching in the classroom, Sarah owned and operated her own Montessori school which operated at capacity with a wait-list.  She also founded a nature and inquiry-based home-school program called Love of Learning Green on Bowen Island, British Columbia and on Koh Samui, Thailand.  She has now taken this program to Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, where she currently lives with her family.

 

The idea for the Global classroom came from having many visiting families join Sarah's program while traveling on Koh Samui.  Many asked how they could remain involved from afar and so, Love of Learning Green GLOBAL was born.

 

Love of Learning Green GLOBAL

Love of Learning Green GLOBAL connects homeschooling families from around the world through hands-on, environmental, project-based learning.  Children from all over the globe connect, interact, investigate and discover with each other through engagement in weekly Earth-centered projects.  Sarah creates weekly nature-based projects that children/families do at home.  In addition to creating the projects, Sarah offers a multitude of ways to integrate and extend the learning for different ages.  Along with the weekly projects, Sarah also creates a weekly mindfulness focus (ie. Compassion) to integrate into the learning with suggested creative art projects and ways to practice the weekly focus locally and globally.  Sarah creates 4-week long environmental themes each of which includes 4 ecological projects and 8 mindfulness activities. 

 

How we interact:  Children from all over the globe participate in these weekly projects in their local communities and share and compare videos, photos, questions, comments and cool facts with their global classmates in a closed, members only dynamic forum.  At the beginning of each 4-week theme, children post video-taped (or photos with captions) introductions of themselves including where they live.  This way all of our global classmates meet each other at the beginning of each new unit.  As the children share and discuss their discoveries with each other, a dynamic community of engaged learners is born, cross-cultural friendships are cultivated and our children's natural love of learning is nurtured. 

 

What better way for your child to learn about different environments and cultures than from global classmates who are actually living there?!  All of a sudden your homeschool environment is transformed into a global learning community. 

 

Love of Learning Green GLOBAL is designed to supplement your current homeschooling plans.  It is not a full curriculum but is instead an incredibly dynamic and culturally diverse addition and is designed to fit in easily to your current learning schedules. 

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