For Starters…

A great teacher once told me that if you truly love the children who come into your classroom and truly desire to see them succeed then everything will fall into place. I believe this to be true. The teacher who truly loves the children placed in her classroom will go to whatever lengths necessary to be sure that they succeed. She will make changes where necessary, she will look up new strategies that may assist comprehension, she will alter lessons to meet differing needs, she will demonstrate and allow the students ample time to wrestle with the new material. She will labor out of love for these students. This teacher will desire more than good grades, she will desire to inspire.

This is the kind of teacher I seek to be and to become. A teacher whom students can trust, a teacher who inspires confidence and assurance in her students, a teacher who creates an environment of love, acceptance, and safety. I want my classroom to be a place where students feel safe, where they know what is expected of them, but most of all where they know that they are loved and cared for. Students spend so much of their lives in the classroom, it should be a nurturing atmosphere that helps the child grow in wisdom and stature, academically, socially, psychologically, morally, emotionally, and physically.

This blog is an area where I write about my journey to become this kind of teacher. I record the nifty strategies that I have learned along the way as well as helpful hints about starting up a classroom and handling the different situations that arise throughout the school year. Hopefully you will find some pointers here that will help you on your teaching journey as you seek to meet the needs of the students in your classrooms.

I am currently a middle school Spanish teacher so for this time a lot of my posts will focus around strategies that I have found particularly useful in the foreign language classroom. Many of these strategies are not foreign language specific but rather have been adapted to meet the purposes of my classroom. I encourage you to do the same! I love an interactive classroom and many of these strategies and activities are ones that I would take with me to any classroom, primary through high school, adapting them as necessary, because they are so useful in engaging students and helping them learn core skills such as organization and time management while they learn their academic curriculum.