Ms Kate Ayoub is our new Kindergarten teacher, joining Mrs Kent, Miss Farrugia and Miss Moore and the 71 delightful boys and girls aged four to six years old in the Del Monte Kindergarten. Ms Ayoub is responsible for 17 Kindergarteners who are already well settled in to the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme under her care.
Ms Ayoub is new to the full-time staff of Del Monte but not new to Santa. An ex-student of the College, she is thrilled to be back, saying the culture and values of the College are happily unchanged since her days as a student not very long ago.
She has come straight to Santa Sabina from university apart from casual teaching positions across classes from Prep to Year 7 here and at other schools last year. But the positions were mostly here, she confesses, as Santa was her top choice.
“The strong background of Veritas and the Dominican tradition I learnt here have shaped me as a person”, she says.
“The values of truth, justice and integrity are present in every aspect of our teaching pedagogy. I really appreciated this in my education here.”
A musician and photographer, Ms Ayoub did not plan on teaching as a career when she left school. She went into business as a freelance photographer and began a Commerce degree to help her with the practical side of that career. But she soon realised Commerce was not where her heart lay and took the advice of her careers advisor from school who had told her to work with children.
She enrolled in a Bachelor of Education degree (early Childhood and Primary) at Macquarie University and it was while studying primary school teaching that she realised she had found where she wanted to be.
As a Santa Sabina College student she was involved in the concert band as the only bass guitarist. She wrote music and took up the piano and later learnt photography from Art Teacher Mr Brian Walker who has taken her portrait photo below. She has kept photography as a sideline, taking portraits of friends and family.
And her music lives on the Kindergarten classroom. “I use rhythm and music all the time in class”, she says.
“I sing when they’re packing up and teach them things like the days of the week through songs. Music uses all parts of the brain and helps you remember”.
