By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
Kenwood Elementary School kindergarten teacher Annette Teet inspires and encourages her students every day to develop a love for learning.
From arrival to departure, she believes the key to teaching five- and six-year-olds is active engagement, she told members of the Bowling Green Kiwanis Club on Thursday. As part of the club’s Teacher Appreciation Month, Teet was honored for taking on the rewards and challenges of teaching kindergarten.
She has taught kindergarten for 28 of her 31 years as a teacher and loves the excitement of kindergarten.
Teet has witnessed plenty of changes in the curriculum, from play-based, half-day kindergarten to the full-day curriculum of today that also has been impacted by technology.
“Through these changes in curriculum, one thing has always remained constant—active engagement for student learning,” she said. Calling active engagement, the “core foundation of my teaching style,” she described it as hands-on experiences, incorporating music and movement into student learning and fostering student connections in their everyday lives and academics.
Each year, she welcomes 15 to 20 new kindergartners to her classroom or as she explains, their home for the year since they spend all day together.
Her studies prepared her well to become a teacher, but the classroom is where she learned the most to become the educator she is today.
The first classroom that impacted her was the kindergarten classroom of Patricia McGinnis, “one of my most influential teachers, along with Mary Lou Wagner, Francis Brent and Virginia Crockett,” she said. She remembered, “Mrs. McGinnis played the piano, sang and made stories come alive. I still remember her smile and her kindness.”
She still teaches those same songs to her students that McGinnis taught her in kindergarten. Teaching is all about building relationships with your students, celebrating the unique characteristics that each student brings to the classroom and keeping them actively engaged.
“I thought it might be fun to take you into our kindergarten classroom and show you what a typical day looks like from the inside,” she told the club members. “I hope you will see and hear the excitement, engagement and enjoyment of learning.”
The day is divided into curricular block of time that range from 30 to 60 minutes, starting with arrival time when lessons are found in routine tasks like hanging up coats and backpacks, signing in for a lunch choice and beginning morning work discovery.
Early math skills, such as counting and patterns, are part of the numbers block. They close out the numbers work by exercising and counting the number of days they are in class. Wednesday, they hit the milestone of 100 days.
Handwriting, letter and sound recognition and beginning decoding skills are taught in the foundations block. “Students need these skills to have a strong foundation for further learning,” Teet said. Echo the Owl puppet might be leading the students through an alphabet letter and sound drill, or students might be tapping out and blending letters together to make real words and nonsense words.
During the writing workshop, students learn to transfer letter sounds and knowledge into written language. They write about personal experiences, eventually learning about informational and opinion writing.
“After all that hard work, it’s time to take a brain break,” she told the club. One of the classroom’s favorites is called “Five Jive,” a get-up-on-your-feet dance that also includes learning to spell and a little math hidden in the activity.
All the club members had a chance to channel their inner kindergartner as they learned the “Five Jive,” counting on their fingers, clapping, spelling “five, various hand motions, stomps and a little twirl. To wrap it up they learned to air-write the number five with a little song, “Across and down and curve around.”
“So in a quick minute, we’ve covered a little bit of language arts, writing, and a bit of math,” she explained.
The next block is the reading workshop. Students are divided into small groups to meet their current academic needs in language arts. “We are able to provide intervention and/or enrichment opportunities to meet the needs of each student,” she said.
The morning concludes with math that includes number recognition, counting, beginning measurement, addition, subtraction and decomposing number zero to 10. Their learning continues as they practice the skills through math workplaces or math centers. “The games and activities provide opportunities for cooperative and independent learning.
Following lunch and recess, they focus on phonemic awareness, “better known as big blue book time,” she said. Students practice alphabet recognition, sound recognition, rhyming segmentation, identifying beginning and ending sounds and phonemic deletion and addition.
“CAT. Take away the C and what is left? “ she asked the club. “AT.”
During the language arts block, Teet focuses on teaching comprehension, sequencing, retelling a story, identifying story elements of characters and settings, and learning the difference between fiction and nonfiction. She also integrates science and social studies into the curriculum.
Students are actively engaged through questioning to develop oral language skills and vocabulary. “Not only are we reading stories, but we often fully immerse ourselves by acting out the main events of the story,” which builds comprehension and the art of retelling stories.
After storytime, the students move into encore classes, rotating between physical education, music and art, on a three-day cycle.
Kenwood and the Bowling Green City Schools are fortunate to have strong community support, Teet said. Students make connections to their daily lives and their communities when local resources such as the parks, fire and safety, and other local businesses and organizations are involved in activities and outings.
She thanked the club for the honor, adding “The true deserving recipients of this award are my students and colleagues. I love the excitement my students bring to kindergarten each and every day. And we have such a caring and talented staff at Kenwood; we are like a family. They inspire me to be the best I can be every day.”
