By FELICITY DARVILLE

WHO would have known that playing with flowers and twigs in the backyard, drawing a hopscotch board on the road with chalky rock, and skipping pebbles along the top of a turquoise sea would one day lead to a professional career helping children to learn better by playing! Angelique Shantel Thompson cherishes her childhood days in The Bahamas. Island kids in her time spent much more time outdoors than kids do today. They were creative, and used things like household odds and ends, old tyres and fabric to come up with all sorts of games.

Angelique never forgets her roots as she touches the lives of countless children using playful learning as a skill to develop their intellect, give them more emotional intelligence, and inspire their confidence. Based in Canada for more than two decades now, Angelique believes that the keys to learning that she imparts can make a world of difference in developing more well-rounded, productive citizens who are self assured and are giving back to others.

Angelique is a reading and kindergarten specialist who has many years of experience teaching in primary, junior and intermediate divisions in the Toronto District School Board. She also served many schools in the district as an early reading coach. She also served as a curriculum writer and substantive editor for many documents for the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario.

Her own educational path included a lengthy tenure at her beloved Alma Mater, St Anne's in Fox Hill, where she schooled from grade one straight to grade 12. After graduating high school, Angelique (known as Shantel in her school days) went on to graduate from York University with a Bachelor of Education and a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Psychology.

Today, her career blossoms as she charts her own path to success. Angelique is currently a Learning Network School improvement coach. She is passionate about infusing issues of equity and social justice into early years classrooms. She uses play-based approaches to learning, and she's finding fantastic results. Kids that would have been deemed as having behavioural issues have flourished thanks to her techniques, which allows children to be engrossed in more hands-on learning. She provides learning exercises with an open-ended play approach, which allows the child to operate beyond stipulations and become real innovators and thinkers.

Her wealth of knowledge and experience has led to her first book publication: "The Gift of Playful Learning" - a guide for educators of pre-kindergarten to grade two, that she co-authored with N Kenisha Bynoe. These ladies lean on their Caribbean roots to help them carve out their unique styles of education. Bynoe has her roots in St Vincent and the Grenadines and together, these ladies have had the privilege of being invited to share their work with educators around the world at the National Association for the Education of Young Children Conference for the past four years. These top-class Caribbean educators believe that classrooms in the islands should have books that mirror the children living there, so they feel a sense of pride in who they are. By creating more culturally appropriate books, Caribbean education systems can lean more towards self empowering educational tools that will bode well for the children's future. The values of island people should be enhanced and not hidden.

"Growing up in The Bahamas, I had a wonderful childhood," Angelique reminisces.

"I was raised in a home of love and I had a large family that surrounded me with a lot of love. Nowhere in the world is as beautiful as The Bahamas. I was blessed and privileged to be born there."

Her mother's family, the McCartneys of Eleuthera, is a tightly knit clan with an immense support system. Her mother Ann Cancino (nee McCartney) and her aunts: Cora McCartney-Major, Mavis McCartney Smith-Bowe, Joan McCartney-Adderley, and godmother Kim Major really shaped her into the woman she is today. Her uncles: Dr Timothy McCartney, Richard McCartney, William Arthur (Wilmac) McCartney and Clinton Reginald McCartney, Sr, were also instrumental in her upbringing. On her father Stephen Cancino's side, they are a small tribe descended from Long Island. His mother's family are the Bartletts. Angelique's aunt Heather Bianca Cancino-Adderley, who passed away in her 30s, also had a profound impact on her life.

Angelique and her brother, Stephen Jermaine Cancino, thrived in their parents' home. However, at school, he had challenges due to dyslexia.

"My parents did everything they could to make sure that my brother got the support he needed to be able to thrive, but a lot of the resources were not available in school systems," she said.

"I knew my brother was brilliant from a young age. He needed hands-on experiences. He needed to touch things... be immersed in things. In school, we listened to the teacher and wrote answers on a paper. For my brother, that just didn't work. I watched myself strive in classrooms while he struggled. I decided that I wanted to be a teacher. I did everything to help him with school, homework, and reading."

The challenges he faced are quite common and can be even more challenging for families from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Angelique had the chance to work with children just like these during her professional journey in Canada. Her time at model schools and inner city schools, teaching kindergarten up to grade 7, helped her to fine tune her skills and provide great opportunities for her students to have phenomenal results.

"The Gift of Playful Learning" is Angelique's first published book, but she has also written a number of curriculum resources for teachers in Canada. Among them, she wrote the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario's Women's Equality Project - Ontario's first feminist curriculum. It gives teachers guidance on how to really empower women and girls in the classroom. She produced several valuable works for the Respond and Rebuild Project, including a guide for teachers on how they can make their classrooms more culturally relevant and responsive. One of her latest curriculum resources, "The Places We Meet", has lessons and ideas around intersectional feminism. Topics include a focus on black women, with guides to help them appreciate and embrace their beautiful skin tones and hair textures.

Angelique is the recipient of the Elementary Teachers of Toronto Excellence in Teaching Equity Award, 2009 and The Toronto District School Board’s Celebrating Excellence in the TDSB Award for Programme/Project Excellence, 2010, along with a team of educators. She also received the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario Writer’s Award for Women’s Programmes in 2019 for her article: "Sisters in the Struggle: Racialized Women and Microaggressions in the Workplace," published in ETFO Voice - a magazine for teachers.

The love she learned as a child is now emulated in her own family, which also has strong Caribbean roots as her husband, Garvey Thompson is of Jamaican heritage. Their son Xavier enjoys both island heritages and the love of his families in the islands. Angelique says her son reminds her of her brother, and thanks to her skills, she was able to apply the playful learning skills she stands by to help him flourish.

Bahamian students can also benefit from her book, "The Gift of Playful Learning". It can be purchased on Amazon, and there is also a link to a free on-demand webinar to help educators apply the books resources to their classroom. The session is called "Planning for Playful Learning" and is found at https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/professional-learning/on-demand-webinars/.

To benefit from Angelique's wealth of materials for educators, visit her consulting firm's website: https://www.coachescornerey.com. She conducts public virtual and in person "playshops" (not workshops) for educators. School boards, administrators and teachers interested in personal sessions can reach out to her on the website, which also offers articles and lesson resources to help children become their best.