Ko Tararua te maunga 

Ko Ruamahanga te awa 

Ko kohunui te marae 

Ko takutimu te waka 

Ko ngati Kohungunu te iwi 

Ko Jo Gregory ahau 

I grew up in Te Tairāwhiti, Gisborne, New Zealand. I have a passion for tamariki (children)  who need that extra awhi (love) and support.  I have a Diploma in Early Childcare Education (ECE) Teaching and Postgraduate Diploma in Specialist Teaching with a focus on Early Intervention, I also have a Whanau Ora Diploma. I have taught in education (Early Childhood Education and School settings) for over 30 plus years. I have taught children with additional needs to enhance their communication skills. While teaching in a local specialist school I worked with very high needs students who were non verbal. I observed within my class that there was no communication between students and staff and there was a lot of unwanted behaviour. I knew that I had to learn to communicate with them as well as teach them how to communicate with me. I learnt about the coreboard and needed to understand it better so I could help students to have two way conversations. I needed to learn how the coreboard communication tool worked and needed to support Teacher Aides working within my class setting. I started to focus on learning one or two core symbols at a time. I started creating my own laminated stories for the students by embedding symbols into stories I was reading in class at the mat time. I realised this was helping students, teacher aids and myself to learn to use the coreboard better for communication. I started to use the symbols in all curriculum areas during class time. I started to notice students using coreboards more for basic communication, such as pointing to the symbol “help” when they wanted help with something and “want” when they were wanting something. Knowing this had supported students to learn coreboard symbols I then started thinking how else I could extend this idea. I started creating sentences with the symbols, such as “I want drink”  or “I want help” and “ready go” when playing games. I wanted to help all students who were non verbal and using coreboard for communication, to be able to have two way communication. I started to publish books and present workshops around core symbols and my books.