---

Learn More About Sharon's Experience:

elementary (k-6th) My teaching career of sixteen years, has been in working with primary aged children, with the exception of one year in which I taught elementary general music for kindergarten through fifth grade. Of the fifteen remaining years, eleven of them were in the classroom teaching kindergarten and second grade. I experienced much success as a classroom teacher. In most of my years, my students routinely scored higher than my teamates students in reading readiness, reading, and writing. I very much believe that language development is of upmost importance in developing life long readers. Children who can decode words are doing very well, but children who know the meaning of the decoded words, and how to use them in context, are far ahead in reading skills. Comprehension cannot happens without knowledge of the meaning of the words being read. I believe in working a great deal with words, both making them and learning their meanings. I typically use letter tiles so that the children are actually toughing the leters, and can trace their shapes in the early stages of learning the alphabet and its sounds. The children are using touch, sight, and hearing when we do this work. They have benefitted greatly from daily word work lessons by becoming better spellers, betters readers, and better writers. I believe in a phonics based approach to teaching reading with sight words being a part of the learning. I so enjoy working with primary aged children and would like to continue to do so. ESL/ESOL I am currently in my fourth year teaching ESOL, the equivalent of ESL, in a public school setting. I teach thirty kindergarten and first grade children and have in the past taught second grade students as well. My students routinely make excellent progress academically as well as in acquiring English language speaking skills. With very few exceptions, my students perform at or above grade level expectations at the end of the school year as well as at the beginning of their next school year. I have had Spanish speaking children enter kindergarten with a "zero language" status, and exit the program in first or second grade. It is a joy to work with these young children because they are refeshing and eager to learn. I do prefer to teach children in the primary grades, namely, kindergarten, first, and second grades. grammar My seventeen year old daughter thinks of me as the grammar police, because I have always felt that it is extremely important to be well spoken. When she was beginning to talk, both her father and I would say "we say___" in order to teach her the correct way of saying what she had just said in an incorrect way. This backfired when she got to second grade and routinely corrected her teacher's grammar, which did need correction! Today, she self-corrects, and rarely makes errors. She is a well spoken young lady. My parents insisted that both my sister and I use our language in the correct manner, so my own usage to this day is better than that of most people. I cringe when I hear people use the word myself when they should be saying me or I. I also hate hearing "I" when it should be "me", and vice versa. Incorrect tenses of words, such as "I seen", rather than "I saw", are much to common, even with educators who should know better. I would be willing to work with students of any age in this area. phonics Except for my first several years in the kindergarten classroom, when whole language was the required approach to teaching reading, I have been teaching in phonics based classrooms. Even when we were required to teach the whole language approach, I would always "sneak in" some phonics because I knew that children absolutely needed to know the sounds the letters made in order to decode. Even in teaching ESOL reading, as I now do, phonics is the basis of my lessons. I always teach the grade level sight words along with the phonics so that the children will be successful, on grade level readers. Because I have been very successful teaching primary level children, I would prefer to continue working with the younger children. piano I would like to teach basic piano technique to young beginners in piano. Many years ago, as a favor to their parents, I taught two neighborhood children for just their first year or two of lessons. This was mainly to see if they really wanted to study piano. I then sent them on to my best friend who was a teacher with more advanced skills and experiences than my own. All three of the children took until college and were very accomplished pianists. I feel that I gave them the good background they needed. I play piano myself, limiting myself to the classics, which I adore.