Tessa wanted to teach from the first day she arrived in Mrs Nell’s classroom, aged five.
This passion never waned, and she went on to earn her teaching qualifications. While she only taught in a traditional school for a year after graduating, her life has been filled with teaching in a variety of settings outside the classroom.
Tessa has a wide range of experience within the Early Childhood Education field. She has supervised a pre-school with specialist work in the sensory motor area and she has worked as a child and family therapist in a hospital working with families on their challenges relating to family life.
She has taught adult students in the area of teaching and child development over the years, and has owned and operated a GymbaROO centre for nine years.
Tessa is the “Tessa” in Tessarose Productions, a business that has produced music for children for over 30 years and has recorded over 700 songs.
Currently Tessa is a certified Rhythmic Movement Training Practitioner and runs a kinesiology clinic for children and adults. She is also working part-time as a child development lecturer at the University of Canterbury and is the Research and Education Manager for GymbaROO-KindyROO in Australia.
Tessa completed a PhD focused on children’s primitive reflexes, an interest that was sparked by Dr Jane Williams at a GymbaROO conference in 1996. Primitive reflexes that do not follow the typical progression of being used as the child goes down the birth canal, aiding with initial survival and then integrating, can cause challenges for children as they develop. Tessa has always looked for the cause of a developmental challenge and then addressing it, rather than looking at the symptoms and putting on a band-aid.
Each week, to keep her in-touch with the real world, Tessa teaches four music classes with children aged six months to five years. She believes that being in close contact with children, enables her to continue to develop as a teacher of teachers.
When Jane asked if Tessa would like to co-author a book on the importance of grandparents in a child’s development, it seemed a very important place to put some accurate and current information. Although Tessa is not a grandparent, she has many friends who are grandparents, and she was always being asked questions about what they should do. Sometimes the questions are big philosophical ones, ‘What is the best way to manage a tantrum?’, and sometimes it was as simple as ‘What is the best type of pram?” It was also interesting how little they knew about child development, even though they had very successfully raised their own children. When she learned that they were really interested in learning more about what is good for their grandchildren, Tessa knew that the project, Grandparenting Grandchildren, was going to fill an important gap in a generation’s knowledge of how to raise healthy, well-adjusted children.