Ever since I was 5 years old, I have wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. I want to make sure kindergarten is memorable for students. I want them to remember kindergarten as a fun and exciting time in their lives. Working with children all day and helping them begin their learning experience in school is what drew me to teaching.

My favorite part about teaching is seeing my students' faces light up when they finally understand a concept we’ve been working on. They get so excited that they finally understand a new concept, and I get excited right along with them. Sometimes I send them to the office to share the good news about their huge success.

I believe that early childhood students learn through kinesthetic activities. I use different instructional strategies that allow my students to hear and manipulate materials to improve their phonological awareness and skills by incorporating kinesthetic learning in the classroom for literacy. For instance, to help students learn letter sounds, I created a motion for every letter in the alphabet. We use the motions every morning when we sing a song by Dr. Jean, "Who Let the Letters Out". The students are also looking at the letter while they sing the song and doing the motion for the letter. At stations, there are magnetic letters in a bowl. Students use a toy dog with a magnet on its nose to pull letters from the bowl.

One year I had a student who often got frustrated in the classroom. Skills did not come as easily for him as they did for other students, even artistic skills. For example, it took until the end of March for this young man to finally be able to draw a person. He was so proud of himself. It gave him confidence to tackle other skills and believe that he could succeed at them.

For children to have success in school, they need to feel like they can succeed at anything. Part of that comes from having a strong support system at school and at home.

Parents can become involved by helping in the classroom, asking the teacher how they can help at home and just talking to their children about their day at school.

If a student is struggling to learn something, I let parents know how to help their children at home. For instance, if the problem is letter sounds, students might take home ABC cards for a few nights and go over them with a parent. We might ask parents who read books to children to have them look for certain letters in the words. Another home activity is getting a magazine and finding pictures of things that begin with a given letter.

I’m looking forward to seeing how much my students will have grown by the end of the year. They come in with limited knowledge and by the end of the year they are reading and doing addition problems. Every day, they come in all eager to learn and excited about the new experiences they are having in school.