Never Stop Learning!
Hi! My name is Shelly Jennings. I am an elementary teacher in the Maize School District. Teaching children is a love of mine. I began my teaching career in a fifth grade classroom for five years, followed by kindergarten, second grade, third grade, pre-school, third grade again and now second grade. The most challenging piece of education is reaching all the various levels of learners I encounter at the beginning of a school year. This is also the most rewarding piece. To take each student and start with them where they arrive in August and continue to excel them throughout the school year is amazing…to literally watch them grow and progress! Some students arrive with little or no skills; some arrive with low vocabulary knowledge; some with inadequate reading and/or fact fluency, some comprehension and others just trying to piece it all together. My thesis study in graduate school (2008-2010) focused on the bottom quartile of readers in my classroom. Based upon their fall, NWEA scores, those students have been placed on an additional, 15 minutes per day of intense reading instruction, focusing on vocabulary and fluency. Within the regular classroom they focused on missed phonics standards they lacked. Together, these pieces significantly helped these students grow and progress to where their reading levels should be and some continued to progress further. I will continue to use these strategies and try other research-based strategies to help my lower readers achieve and continue to use some math fact fluency strategies for my math students to achieve. My teaching philsophy is simple: All students can learn...Meet each student at their current level...Continue to challenge them....Watch them grow.