This is the happy face of a proud Girl Scout earning her Gold Award. My daughter, Zooey, spent a good part of the year working on her final Girl Scout project for her Gold Award. Zooey’s project focused on the education of skin care awareness and melanoma prevention, the disease that we lost my dad …
Squash Blossoms
This is my second summer to grow squash and zucchini and I’m making sure I don’t miss an opportunity to use them while they’re bursting in my little garden. They are reminding me of a hibiscus flower…delicate and opening only for the sun. Once I picked them, I used them right away because they don’t …
Advice from an elementary teacher about summer learning
Next year will mark my twenty-fifth year to be an elementary teacher. Parents ask me a lot of questions about how to keep their child learning during the summer. The best thing is to of course enjoy summertime and get in all the family time that school schedules get in the way of. Here are …
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Dancing at Ivybrook Academy
My dear friend Kris surprised me with a question…”could you come dance at my school for career day?” Of course I said yes! When I grew up, I always said that I wanted to be a ballerina. I’m an educator with a dancer’s heart. The best audiences are always children. I was delighted and can’t …
Cadillac in my closet
My Pilates journey began when I was a freshman in college as a dancer. I knew at eighteen that I’d be practicing Pilates for the rest of my life. Joseph Pilates philosophy on exercise and life align with mine. I earned my Pilates certification in 2003 from Peak and started teaching Pilates on the side …
The importance of having friends at work
Working with my closest friends makes my job a joy. Laughing together every single day makes me excited to get to work. I look forward to the coffee talk, lunch together and celebrating each other’s birthdays. When we have dull professional developments, it’s nice to have someone to look at and make faces. My work …
Beautiful Birthday Books for Children
Celebrating a child’s birthday with their peers brings so much joy. I’m on my twenty-fourth year of being an elementary teacher. For many of those years, we celebrated birthdays with cupcakes. What most elementary teachers do now is much more meaningful than cupcakes. We celebrate with a book. Parents choose a book, wrap it like …
Chicken and biscuit dumplings
There’s a new staple in my pantry…buttermilk biscuits from Biscuit Head. I’m a fan of cozy comfort foods and have previously made them using Parmesan cheese and flour. I was out of Parm and having a snow day with biscuit mix in the pantry…I’ll never do dumplings any other way. They floated on my chicken …
Merge Cube
I’ve been working on my masters at ASU in learning design and technologies. I worked on an applied project and an evaluation in research. I was inspired to research and create an eLearning course on “An Introduction to Merge Cube.” It’s easily accessible and a lot of fun. I’m pushing it out to elementary teachers because it’s the teachers that need to …
Social Emotional Learning
I’m in my twenty-fourth year of being an elementary teacher and my passion has always been fostering a caring community. There is so much that can be gained from teaching young children social emotional learning. They need help learning how to navigate relationships, social awareness, and self-management which are all essential SEL tools to carry …
Lemon Curd
We have the sweetest little lemon tree that my parents gave us several years ago. It makes me so happy to see more lemons coming back each year. The anticipation is even sweeter. We watch and wait for the lemons to ripen. The very beginning of November was lemon harvest time for us in Texas. …
Wishing you a rosy school year
We’re back in school and if you try REALLY hard you can find the sweetness…my own kids are so happy to be back. My first grade students come to school with BIG smiles excited to learn in-person. Teachers are happy to teach at school and not virtually. It’s true that the soul is healed by …