Over years of teaching classes of mainly Māori children, she gradually developed her ideas on child-based or organic literacy teaching and her key vocabulary techniques.

She then worked in Horoera, Pipiriki, Waiomatatini and Omahu, in schools with all or predominantly Māori rolls for 24 years. She attended Wairarapa College in Masterton, 1926–1927 and Auckland Teachers' Training College, 1928–1931. Career Īshton-Warner chose teaching as a career partly because it was familiar to her from childhood days spent in her mother’s classroom, and partly because it gave her a chance to teach her passions, art and music. The older children were left at home with their mostly bedridden father. When her father’s health deteriorated, her mother became the sole bread winner, thus needing to take her younger children to school with her to sit in her classroom while she taught. She was the daughter of Francis Ashton Warner, a bookkeeper, and Margaret Maxwell, a schoolteacher 14 years his junior.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner was born on December 17, 1908, in Stratford, New Zealand. Her ideas for a child-based or organic approach to the teaching of reading and writing, including key vocabulary techniques, have gained currency and are still used and debated internationally today. Sylvia Constance Ashton-Warner MBE (17 December 1908 – 28 April 1984) was a New Zealand novelist, non-fiction writer, poet, pianist and world figure in the teaching of children. For the American silent film actress, see Sylvia Ashton.

Teacher by sylvia ashton warner