Hello, I have been teaching Middle and High School English classes in Colorado for the past twelve years. My family has lived in Western Colorado since 2000. When I am not teaching, I enjoy volunteering with our local community theater and birding with the Black Canyon Audubon Society. I've written and published multiple plays, poems, articles, and academic curriculum. I also have written and illustrated four children's books and one Young Adult fantasy novella. All of these texts are currently available on Amazon.com as well as our local coffee shop. I enjoy reading, writing, painting, biking, camping, and hiking with our two dogs Lola and Buddy.

I truly enjoy teaching English Language Arts for middle grades. I taught high school for a few years, but tweens are my favorite age group. I have extensive training in creative lesson planning and differentiation for a variety of levels and learning styles, and I recently took 20+ hours of grad courses to expand and improve my current ELA units. This helps me keep my classes relevant and engaging.

In my ELA classes, students will explore (and eventually master) skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening including essay writing, note taking, literary themes, speech making, student seminars, and vocabulary expansion.  At each level, we will use novels as central texts, while adding in plays as a new genre to their academic reading list.  Writing assignments will include composing articles for a news writing unit, mastery of grammar rules, writing poetry, composing research papers, and learning APA style essay formatting. 

Specific books we will use per grade level:

English 8: The Miracle Worker by William Gibson,  Copper Sun by Sharon Draper, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne,  Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.  Students will also read several non-fiction articles and memoirs connected to their Holocaust unit. We will end the year by researching, composing, and publishing articles for three issues of a school newspaper as students learn to recognize and compose three different types of news articles.

English 7:  Downriver by Will Hobbs, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, and Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. Students will continue their sixth grade studies of literary elements and genres, as well as composing fictional narratives, character and theme analyses, and research papers. We will also do a creative writing unit that includes poetry anthologies and graphic novel style stories.

English 6: The Giver by Lois Lowry, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit, A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, and The Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. Students will be introduced to basic literary elements and five different genres of literature. They will also learn to form a thesis and construct academic essays including expository, narratives, character and theme analyses, and research papers. There will also be a creative unit that includes poetry and short stories at the end of second semester.

Please refer to the new parent guide on the district website for more detailed explanations of academic goals, specific standards, and skills.      It is available in pdf and booklet formats.