Teacher, Mother, Grandmother, Lover of Learning
I’ve always loved learning, especially through traveling and meeting people of different cultures and backgrounds.
Teaching has taken its course in my life.
I was 24 when I obtained my multiple subject teaching credential and started teaching a bilingual classroom of first graders. I quickly grew to love the Spanish-speaking students and their close-knit, hardworking families.
After becoming a mother, I homeschooled my own three children (the two girls in matching dresses and the boy with a hat), and offered Spanish classes to the homeschool community.
For a few years between homeschooling, I taught the upper grades at two different private schools while my children attended the classes for younger students. During that time, my husband went back to school for a career change.
For my husband's new job, our family then moved from Humboldt to Mendocino County in Northern California. I continued to seek great resources and create my own Spanish curriculum with units that apply to real life experiences.
Before my children starting attending public high school, I taught Spanish to both them and their friends at a three room school that let us use their facility twice a week. I also taught ELD, Spanish and other subjects each summer in the public school.
For three of the nine years I taught summer classes, my children helped me work with second and third graders who needed extra academic help. I also taught high school English for bilingual students during my last three years of teaching summer school.
I went back to teaching full time in 2005 starting with a kindergarten class. It was a great mix of students since half of them were native Spanish speakers and the other half were English speakers. It was a joy to experience each other's cultures. I also obtained my single subject credential in Spanish that year.
In 2007, I transferred to the high school to teach ESL and then took over the classes for the retiring Spanish teacher. I was so excited to reach my goal of becoming a full time Spanish teacher! For nine years, I taught various levels of Spanish classes for five periods each day.
Although I had to follow a textbook, I continued to make up my own lessons, documents and activities to keep the students actively engaged. Most of them never liked the textbook and its cumbersome worksheets , so each year I would find more ways to make learning Spanish meaningful and interactive for them.
Students would often work in pairs or small groups. Their corn husk dolls became characters who spoke Spanish in their mini videos. I constantly thought of creative ways to encourage them to speak Spanish. We did a lot of collaborative learning projects and activities during the school year.
We turned the classroom into a marketplace on a day that they could only communicate in Spanish. The students put prices on the yard sale items they brought from home using fake pesos. They learned how to convert them into dollars as well as how to bargain for the items they wanted to buy or sell.
I retired from the public schools in 2017 and was honored to received the Master Teacher Award by the Superintendent of our district. Since then, I have been working with multiple age groups of children -and my own grandchildren- to create a Spanish program that is fun and practical for others to use.
My Family
My husband, Mike, and I have been married since 1985. Mike is a skilled carpenter and has worked at the building department for 25 years on the Mendocino Coast of California.
Our son, Paul and his wife, Alice, are speech language pathologists. Paul, also known as Mr. Elephant, writes and produces songs and videos for children.
Our daughter, Emeline, is a piano teacher, sourdough baker and a busy mom! She and her husband, Alex, have four amazing children who continue to grow in wonderful ways.
Our daughter, Moriah, has a BA in psychology and is an ASL/English Interpreter for the deaf community. She presently works as the deaf and hard of hearing teacher for Mendocino County.