Transitions in Teaching

What I enjoy most about teaching is the relationships I make with my students and watching them grow. As a first grade teacher, I get to see [the first graders] come in as kindergarteners and they leave ready prepared for 2nd grade. That growth is huge and I love seeing that. Most students enter first grade knowing their letters and sounds and a few sight words. During their first grade year, there is a lot of growth and development that occurs with reading. Students leave first grade reading and writing fluently on their own. They begin with short decodable passages and writing one to two sentences. By May, many students are reading longer stories, even beginning chapter books. They are writing paragraphs about a certain topic. Knowing that I was able to set that foundation for their literacy journey and watching them excel is a wonderful feeling.

I think one of the biggest challenges in teaching is just being able to meet all of my students' needs each year. I feel like that gap has widened between students that have come in ready to learn and students who come to school ready to be loved and be able to meet all those needs. We have a strong support staff here. We rely on our counselor and our behavior specialist, [as well as] our title one teacher to kind of help us with those needs in the classroom. When we all work together, we can meet those needs of our students.

I do feel like teaching has changed since I began about twenty years ago. I definitely see more technology being used in the classroom for students and the teachers. We’re expected to use technology just in our planning and learning online curriculum, and implementing that and having our students use it as well. When I first started we did not have any ipads in the classroom and now students have one-to-one with ipads. That has been a big change; the technology part.

Clay Center is my home town. I grew up on a farm about eleven miles west of here. So it was great to be able to come back and give back to the community which I love very much. I love seeing and working with students [and] families that I know and watching them grow up and be successful and continue to give back to our community.