I have experience teaching children in Kindergarten through 8th grade in the Bethel school district. I have mostly focused on teaching science, and have served as representative on District-wide comittees to bring the most engaging curriculum possible to children. I believe that children learn best when they are presented with as many modes of learning as possible in hopes to make connections with ideas from many perspectives. If a child understands a concept after painting, singing, acting, reading, and writing about it, they have more pathways to access the knowledge and hopefully are able to tap into more creative solutions to problems by drawing on a more holistic understanding.

Teaching children has always been my focus. I believe in teaching children how to love learning by offering engaging curriculum that is child-directed, hands-on, and minds-on. My 14 years of teaching experience began as a middle school science teacher, and I have slowly migrated downward in grade level, teaching 5th, 3rd, kindergarten, preschool, and now, I am completing the circle by teaching classes that offer parents evidence-based strategies for raising preschoolers.

For five years, the Brain Development Lab has worked with local Head Starts to assess the efficacy of various interventions, including music, language, attention and parenting classes. In our careful research, we have learned that teaching children how to pay attention, and teaching parents evidence-based strategies to use with their preschoolers at home, creates the greatest cognitive growth over the eight-week intervention. We are continuing to develop the attention training for children and the parent program, and have created a hybrid of the two interventions to offer a family-focused intervention, intended to concurrently boost the tools of the child and the parent(s).

I am currently working as a teacher for a project that is studying the effects of the arts on brain development of low SES students. I will be teaching four separate classes: music/art, science, language, and focused attention. The classes will take place at the Whiteaker Head Start program, working with groups of five to seven kids, three to five years-old. There will also be a group of parents that receive training to better understand their role of being an attentive parent.

I love to be outside. Hiking through the forest, bike touring across the countryside, gardening in my backyard, or even sitting outside and enjoying the fresh air. I love to draw, paint, sculpt, cook, and create in general. I always find time to take my dog to the river, and when the weather is nice, I take a book to read along the banks.