Noora Pourmoradian

My journey as a teacher began with a music teacher training. As I continued to pursue education, my curiosity for making teaching more effective led me to explore various educational methods such as Montessori, nature school facilitation or music therapy. I realized that the closer the teaching methods were to the natural tendencies of children, the more spontaneous, joyful, and lasting the learning experience became.

I was looking for a way to teach music that would allow children to learn naturally, and that was when I discovered Edwin Gordon's Teaching Method. It's an excellent way to teach music to children from a young age, similar to how they learn a mother tongue in a natural and pressure-free environment. This led me to start 'mother and child' music classes, combining Gordon's method with color, art, and sensory activities in a nature school setting. Within three to six months, toddlers in these classes showed significant progress.

Since toddlers love stories, I started incorporating storytelling into my teaching methods. This sparked my creativity, and I began writing stories and sketching and also taking online courses to unleash my artistic side. Two of my teachers encouraged me to illustrate children, and I found a new way to communicate with them. For the past 2 years, I have been writing and illustrating children's books.

I also began volunteering to teach moral and nonviolent techniques to Iranian and Afghan refugee children, and teaching English to Turkish-speaking children. I also combined Teaching English and Persian with storytelling, and this new approach led me to teach online in a different field as a job. Now, I am interested in pursuing visual arts to use it as a language to communicate with children and young people, and I believe combining visual arts and story can convey complex concepts in a simple and effective way. I am excited to start a new chapter in my academic and professional life.

Illustration Techniques to Unlock your Creativity