Hello! Welcome to my website! I am excited to be teaching your child this year. There are lots of new things we are going to be learning this year. I look forward to getting to know you and your child better and working together to make this a wonderful, productive year.
I have been married for 25 years to my husband, Darrell, and we have three children. Justin is 23 and is a first year PE teacher at Horace Mann Elementary in Shawnee, Oklahoma. He is also the Head Coach for Shawnee High School Girls Soccer. He is a recent graduate of Oklahoma Baptist University. He is planning on becoming a youth minister in the future but for now is going to coach soccer at the high school level and teach PE. He also coaches two competitive soccer teams in Shawnee. Melanie is 21 years old and is a licensed cosmetologist. She works at the mall at Trade Secrets. (You might see my hair go through a variety of changes during the year! ☺ ) She is consistently one of the top 4 stylists in her four state region. She lives in Tulsa with a couple of friends. Jarrod is 19 years old and a FRESHMAN at Tulsa Community College. He is working part time at Coney Beach, cooking hot dogs and hamburgers.
This will be my eleventh year teaching kindergarten here in Bixby. I graduated from Oral Roberts University with my Master's in Early Childhood Education in 1997. I was honored to be selected as the Outstanding Graduate Student at ORU that year. I obtained National Board Certification as an Early Childhood generalist in 2003. I have also taught some early childhood classes at the undergraduate level at ORU in the past. In past summers, I have been an assessor for the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards assessing in the areas of Early Childhood and Literacy. This past summer, I received an educational grant from Fund for Teachers that allowed me to travel to Hawaii for three weeks. I attended a literacy and the arts workshop at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center, held in conjunction with the Hawaii Department of Education and the Kennedy Center for the Arts. It was a fantastic workshop! I have lots of ideas I can't wait to use in my classroom. Darrell and I had a wonderful time visiting the islands of Maui, Hawaii, and Oahu. In addition to learning about integrating the arts into my literacy program, I also got to learn so much about ocean animals, volcanoes, the agricultural crops of Hawaii, and Hawaiian culture. I The link to my blog about that trip can be found on the Fun Links section of this website. You can read there about all the things we got to do. It was a trip of a lifetime! I am now in the Oklahoma Master Teacher program and will be leading research-based book studies with teachers in the Tulsa region this fall and spring.
Learning is a life-long endeavor, and I hope to help instill a love for education and self-improvement in your children. Feel free to contact me should you have questions or concerns. You can reach me at 366-2690 or by email.
This is me at my kindergarten graduation!
My teaching assistant is Tammy Lauderdale. Tammy is my right hand in the classroom. She is so wonderful with the children and is such a help to me. She is married to Brad and they have a son, Jacob, who is in the fourth grade here at North. This is a picture of him with their cat.
