Michele

Welcome to A Year in the Life of a Third Grade Teacher! I am so glad you stopped by and I hope you get some good ideas while you're here. My name is Michele and my passion is teaching.

I began my teaching career almost by accident. In college I had studied Japanese as an elective during my senior year. Through the classes I took with Kobayashi Sensei (my professor), I found out about an opportunity to teach in Japan, even though I had a political science degree and no teaching experience. I applied to this amazing teaching program (the JET Programme!), moved to Japan, and started team-teaching with Japanese teachers of English in middle schools right outside of Tokyo.

It wasn't until I started working with elementary-aged students in their English language after-school clubs that I really had an aha moment---I was kind of good at this teaching thing! That was it--the deal was sealed.

I sent off an application to grad school to get my post-graduate Master of Teaching degree and here I am!

My first U.S. teaching job was as a kindergarten teacher. I taught kindergarten for two years, then moved up to first grade, which is the grade I loved and taught for many years. I taught overseas for several years (first grade, and a multi-age K-2 class).

After my own son was born, I decided it might be a good time to make a change and move up--and here I am teaching third grade for my third year now.

I started this blog to document my year. I'm not really sure where this journey will take me yet, but I'm excited to share it with you! I envision this blog to be a place where I can write about what we work on in class in third grade, share/save ideas, and reflect on my teaching practice.

However, I plan to let this blog grow organically so please bear with me as I attempt this very haphazard documentation of my life as a teacher--I don't want my own life to get too lost in all of this, so I'm planning to take it slowly.

Please check back frequently or subscribe to this blog to see when updates are posted! Thank you for stopping by!