Primarily First

I retired from teaching in 2016 after being in the classroom for 37 years. Most of my teaching career was either in kindergarten or first grade. I do miss being in the classroom so creating items for teachers to use with their students helps me to keep my heart in education.

I loved working with young children. I loved being on the front line when students had those 'ah-ha' moments in their learning. To that end, I created a safe environment so my students felt loved and had a safe space to do the hard work of learning. My interactions with my students was definitely data driven. Everything from station work to math/reading/writing conferences was individualized to meet the needs of the individual student. I tried my best to keep the kids at the edge of their learning so I could move them to their next step...and then their next step, and their next step, and so on and so on. Math is a passion of mine. It is such a passion that while I was in the classroom I wanted to share my love of math with my students. To that end, I made math time fun, hands-on and visually understandable. I tried to integrate it into our day as much as possible. This can be seen specifically during our calendar math time. Place value is a huge concept for our young learners to grasp and understand. To help my students with this concept, we kept track of the number of days in school, the daily weather, and our 'lost' teeth on ten frame class graphs. Our number of days in school was also tracked through our 'Bead a Day' activity. You can see these activities specifically in my store under the Classroom Essentials Store Category. You'll also find pictures from my classroom math calendar time in some of the resources - like the daily weather graph or lost tooth graph - so you can see our daily place value work in action. As you look through the resources in my store, you'll see items like my Student Resource Book that gives students tools to be independent workers. You'll find items that could be considered 'the next step' in a child's learning. You'll find resources like Sight Word Sentence Scramble that can be individualized to meet the next steps for your learners. You'll find reading games will have different sets of cards so you can choose the cards/words that will meet the changing needs of your students. For example, some games have CVC word cards along with CVCE word cards. You can pull out a mixture of the cards, use only the short a cards, use short a with CVCE long a cards. Use whichever cards you need to use so that you can meet the needs of your students. I hope that after reading about my teaching style you better understand the thinking behind the resources I have created for teachers to use in meeting the needs of their students. Enjoy!

BA in Elementary Education with a minor in mathematics from the University of Northern Colorado. Master's Degree in Teaching and Learning with an ESL endorsement from Regis University.

I started my career as a Title I Math Teacher which I thoroughly enjoyed for 3 years. The following years were spent teaching kindergarten, first or second grade. My store name is Primarily First because I spent the bulk of my career in first grade. I would say that teaching math is my passion. I purposefully plan and prepare math lessons that help students to build their understandings of how numbers work so they can be flexible in their thinking about numbers rather than learning math as sets of rules and facts to memorize.