Tok School's Fantastic 4th Graders

Weekly Greetings! Wow, we had a great first week in 4th grade! This is a fantastic group of students, and I am truly privileged to help mold their future through the coming school year. I see abundant potential in them all. I have a distinct structure on how I manage my classroom, and we started off on the first day in small groups with the students working to establish what the three main rules looked like, and sounded like in the classroom. We focused on "Being Safe", "Being Kind", and "Being a Good Listener". It was wonderful to see how well each group cooperated together and the ideas they generated were perfect! The second day, we plunged into some reading review strategies and our new math program. The students also worked on a descriptive paragraph about something fun they did this summer. In Social Skills, we covered five of the "Six Keys" for success this year,...

Weekly Greetings!   Everything is ready to go! The start of a new school year has finally arrived! I am probably more excited than the students, as there are so many fun ideas rolling around in my head to make this a great year of learning for the group. I have added a few pictures of the class that the students will come in to see the first day. My hope it that it will be a comfortable place for them to grow and learn this year.  We will have a couple of class pets. A little hamster that we will need to name, and a tadpole that we will watch become a frog .  Our first week will be all about instructional and classroom routines. Though we will be doing regular content in reading, math, writing, and science we will also be covering "Six Keys" for fostering and maintaining high motivation and achievement. Everyone has a need to see these keys met, and we will address one a day. The keys are: Safety from fear of embarrassment or physic...

As a new school year begins for your child as one of my fourth grade students, I felt it was important to introduce myself. My journey with the Alaska Gateway School District began in the fall of 2012. For the first two years, I was teaching the kindergarten through 2nd grade groups in Tetlin. For the next two years, I taught the same ages at another village school in Northway. Last fall, I began teaching 4 th grade at the Tok School and will be continuing in that position this year. Before moving to Tok, my background consisted of four years living in Botswana, Africa, with my husband where I taught mostly English as second language learners in grades kindergarten through fourth. Previously, we were long time Alaska residents. Most of our years in Alaska were spent living in the interior bush community of Galena, where I taught an alternative program for teens, 7 th and 8 th grades, Title 1 reading, and kindergarten. For a number of years before obtaining my teacher ce...