I haven't always been a certified elementary school teacher.  A 3rd grader in the Special Education/Life Skills classroom I joined as a paraprofessional aide for two years one day looked up from the Magic Treehouse book we were reading together and said, "I like reading with you.  You should be a real teacher."  That ignited my journey to a second degree from Utah State University midway through my life.  Prior to that, I had freelanced for 17 years as a textbook proofreader, enjoying the ease with which I could spot grammar, spelling, and typesetting errors, but not feeling like I was making a difference that would ever really matter in the world.  Being a mother, I also witnessed the power of a teacher to either crush a spirit or open doors to discovering how fun learning and working with others can be. 

My teaching career was jumpstarted by supportive mentor teachers at each level who allowed me to stretch beyond the requirements for passing student teaching.  A master teacher working in 3rd grade at River Heights Elementary was especially accommodating as I asked to let me teach solo to see if I had what it takes to be a teacher that stuck out, taught from more than just worksheets, and inspired students to accept whatever challenge fell upon them.  I extend the same scaffolding to pre-service teaching candidates, asking them to video-tape themselves teaching (and how the students receive it) before it is required, create experiences that draw threads from many facets of the curriculum, and focus on the needs of the individual students that they must know by name by the end  of their first day in my classroom.  I recommend they develop skills in engaging students through interesting hands-on lessons, keeping students focused on learning through positive classroom management, and assessing understanding and growth by rubric-centered opportunities for students to prove what they know.

The COVID-19 pandemic offered unique challenges for connecting with and teaching students both completely online and within a hybrid model.  March, April, and May of 2020 meant collaborating to offer distanced learning through Zoom and Canvas with a virtual fourth grade mountain man rendezvous capstone celebration and a serendipitous Future feature in the Utah State Magazine (https://utahstatemagazine.usu.edu/culture/teaching-fourth-grade-from-home/).  August, September, and  a bit of October meant being the at-school teacher, racing between two classroom "pods" of half of the 52 students two days a week and the other half another two days a week with the help of two amazing pre-service student teachers and a fearless aide while my grade-level partner managed the online component.  When administrators offered an opportunity for me to fill a vacancy in the first grade team downstairs starting October 19, I took the leap from upper elementary to primary elementary universes.  That decision has allowed me to dive deep into the foundational reading, writing, and math experiences that set learners up for a lifetime.

Admittedly, I was one of those students who memorized what the teacher said to do with math problems, performing the algorithms but often not understanding deeply what it meant in the context of real life.  Story problems made me shake, but back then they were only just a few problems at the end of the assignment; now, every  math problem my students attempt is offered in a story-problem paragraph and we expose them to a variety of ways to work them.  I embrace the focus we now place on deeper understanding with manipulatives, interpreting through drawings or models, and checking the answer for reasonableness.  My students work hard individually to master mental math fact fluency, yet they also work in small groups to verbalize their problem-solving, employing math vocabulary and defending their answer when it differs from another's.

Discovering science through experience means getting messy and asking many tough questions, but this is how I learn, so it is how I offer science concepts to my students.  Taking advantage of workshops from  Utah Master Naturalist, Teton Science Schools, and NASA, for example, I have developed a greater understanding of space, physics, chemistry, and botany, subjects my English degree allowed me to avoid in college my first time through.  We learn in a unique place here in northern Utah, with many resources through the university, landscape, and community members, and I enjoy bringing these into my classroom, or better yet, bring my students out of the classroom walls.  I believe in integrating writing, art, and research projects that allow students to delve deeper into what they discover about how the world works.  My experiences, often with my students in the wild, flavor my Utah Public Radio's "Wild About Utah" segments (https://wildaboututah.org/?s=shannon+rhodes).  

We read aloud a lot in my classroom.  I incorporate award-winning literature and expository text that reinforces science and history topics we are learning, I challenge my students to read fluently and summarize for comprehension both at school and at home, and I bring characters and settings to life through readers' theaters and examinations of comparing and contrasting themes.  My students know that I love ideas, stories, and facts I find in books, and so we also make many of our own.  

Writing is the best way to show what we know, so we focus on how to write effectively for our audience and specific purpose.  I share my life experience seeing manuscripts turn into published textbooks on shelves, and how that process for me meant collaborating with project managers and authors in various parts of the world using collaborative technology.  We have an Author's Chair, and we routinely gather for writing conferences.  We publish a weekly class news that reports happenings in our class with many images of us at work and at play; this way parents stay connected when they cannot be inside the classroom and initiates conversations at home.  Often pre-service student teachers in USU's Writing courses join our class for hands-on workshops with students.

Arts integration in the core standards is a professional passion.  It began when I was in middle school and the gifted-and-talented group at Bonneville Junior High whisked me down to the Utah Shakespeare Festival to see The Tempest.  That led to several years of week-long Camp Shakespeare workshops studying scripts and dramaturgy, costumes and props, stage fighting, sound and lighting, and vocalization exercises with directors, principal actors and actresses as well as investigations of the plays themselves.  I was an Art Specialist at River Heights Elementary School in Cache County School District during Spring 2010 before I signed my first full-time teaching contract.  My fourth grade students composed Spiral Jetty shape poems, watercolored the Bonneville Cutthroat Trout as part of an investigation of endangered species adaptations, and performed scenes from scripts they wrote based on Pam Munoz Ryan's Esperanza Rising.  I often join Utah State University TEAL 5080 course's panel of educators sharing insights especially enhanced by the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program, and in July 2020 I was a "Bridging Differences: Stories from the Trenches – How to Spark Student Engagement" panelist for USU's Arts Are Core virtual arts integration workshop.

When I was invited to participate as a lead teacher on the Smart Foodscapes Sustainable Gardening project in a USDA grant partnership of Utah State University and University of North Carolina Pembroke, I had no idea how much I didn't know about pollinators, citizen science, and the joy of school gardening.  In 2021-2022 we worked on creating and evaluating lesson plans that we then shared in presentations at the Association of Science Teaching Education (ASTE) conference in Salt Lake City and at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) in the spring of 2023.  This is just the latest example of my quest in being a lifelong learner.  While at ASTE, I was able to share our first grade aquatic macroinvertebrate learning journeys with Dr. Steve Kerwin, director of education at the  Stroud Water Research Center, resulting in an exciting article (https://stroudcenter.org/news/wild-about-water/) celebrating another part of our work at EBLS.  My career pushes me to wonder and wander in the wild with bunches of magical people.