Margo Gentile

I am a veteran teacher of 25+ years. The majority of my teaching was done in the Shelton Public Schools. I taught grades K, 1, and 2 as a regular education teacher. If I had to choose, I would say that first grade was my favorite grade level, but I really enjoyed them all. Also, I worked as a special education collaborative teacher for grades K-6. From a teacher's perspective, that job had so many benefits that it's hard to list them all. Not only was the population broad and diverse, but I also had the rare opportunity to witness grade transitions and see how students "phased into" the next grade level. It was interesting to see how students adapted to and met the expectations of the next grade and how their new teachers facilitated this change. As the director of a 5-town Head Start program, I learned many administrative, organizational, problem solving, and people skills. I met the challenge of this job and made a positive impact on the program, but I really missed the kids! I wrote a discretionary grant which awarded our program with the funds to start a "homeschool type" branch of the existing organization. This was a pretty new concept at the time! I was an Odyssey of the Mind coach for 2 years. My responsibilty was to guide and be a facilitator for a group of 5th and 6th graders.It was one of the most interesting jobs I've had. Our groups had to select one problem from a group of given problems and solve it by thinking "outside of the box". The solutions were presented as a "performance" to a group of judges. It took several months for the creative solutions to be worked out. I started a young childrens' line of clothing called "Little Yarns". Each outfit featured a character that I made up and the outfit came with a matching cloth book. Of course the main character of the book was the one on the outfit. Both clothing and books sported braided yarn--as suspenders on the outfit and as a binding on the book. My latest venture is a product called the Color Coded Multiplication program. It is a revolutionary way of memorizing the multiplication facts. The CCM combines the memory power of color, best teaching methodologies, and associative learning for amazing results. Great for "balancing out" those curriculums that are top heavy in concept but have little time for fact memorization. Very helpful to those who are struggling with fluency of the multiplication facts. Being sold at my website: www.margosmathandmore.com