Becky Swain

Teaching Philosophy

Important skills I want to teach my students

I want my students to develop a love for learning and investigating. I think it’s important that they ask questions and I want to help them develop the skills to find the answers to their questions through play, projects, the arts, research, technology, and writing. I also want to help them understand the Seven Values and how each value plays a role in our classroom and school community. I want to build confidence with reading and writing and help students reflect and grow intellectually, socially and emotionally.

Teaching methods to reach these goals

In second grade, students learn in a variety of ways. They learn through independent assignments, assessments, collaborative projects, independent projects, whole class lessons and small group lessons. I always think about the individuals in the class and plan lessons to meet their individual learning needs.

My favorite projects

My favorite project the students participate in is our non-fiction poster project. The students spend several weeks reading non-fiction stories and identifying non-fiction text features. At the end of the study, each student picks an animal and creates a non-fiction poster presenting facts about their animal. The students learn how to write a paragraph with a topic sentence, supporting details and a conclusion. Then they are free to use any of the non-fiction text features we learned about to add additional facts to their poster. Students may draw pictures, use technology, create graphs, write captions and labels, and much more to teach others about their animal. When they finish their posters we laminate them and display them in the hallway for all students to enjoy and learn from! 

What I like best about teaching at Seven Hills

One of the things I love most about Seven Hills is the close family community feeling and the commitment to provide a developmentally appropriate curriculum at all levels. As a teacher, it is wonderful to be able to plan creative lessons, work with colleagues who are constantly striving to become better educators, and always keep the child at the heart of educational decisions. I also love how the ‘whole’ child is valued at Seven Hills. Students have many opportunities to express themselves through Spanish, art, music, physical education, drama, science, library, and computer lab. These engaging classes, along with the traditional academics and a focus on the Seven Values allows each child to find many ways to share their ideas and continue to grow intellectually.