My name is Karen Massey-Cerda. I am originally from the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom where I taught kindergarten and first grade for five years. I came to North Carolina in 2001 on a two-year teaching exchange. This is my tenth year teaching in Catawba County Schools. I am currently teaching my second year in third grade at Lyle Creek Elementary School.
I have always loved to read and did not have any of the difficulties that I see my students facing daily with fluency, accuracy, and comprehension.
My earliest memories are of my parents patiently rereading books that I requested over and over again. Anything that had a rhyming text, such as the Dr. Seuss books, and the Mother Goose Treasury of Rhymes were particular favorites. My brother and I enjoyed performing ‘plays’ about well-loved books and favorite jingles from adverts on television. My Dad would also record us reading aloud nonsense rhymes and limericks that he made up for us and that we had memorized and giggled our way through!
My love of reading continued throughout my teenage years and on to university. At university I was fortunate to have resident children’s authors for my children’s literature professors. They would have us all sit on the carpet and listen to stories, which we thought was brilliant! I fell in love with children’s literature all over again, revisiting childhood favorites and discovering new texts from which I could plan engaging classroom units.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for poetry was dampened by endless dissection of stanzas during my English classes with professors. I put poetry to one side for quite a while until I began my student teaching. It was great to read poetry aloud again simply for enjoyment.
I have always kept a diary up until a few years ago; before assignments and life got in the way! Writing down my thoughts has always given me a sense of calm amongst the chaos and challenges that life brings.
I thoroughly enjoyed teaching the writing process in kindergarten. Seeing the transformation from scribbles, to letters, to sentences was amazing to see. I felt that I did a fairly good job with writing in kindergarten because amongst other things I had time in the day devoted to writing. In third grade this time has been drastically reduced and students are less inclined to write anyway, for fear of mistakes. Unfortunately, my theory of writing was based very much on a linear approach for the third grade curriculum. The model I have explored in our graduate program is altering my approach. I am trying to model a writing process where editing and revising is taking place throughout and not just at the end. These writing theories have also made me aware of how much more time writers need to allocate to the planning stage of writing. Recently I have been working on a writing project as part of our writer’s workshop. It has been very successful especially for my most reluctant writers. However that has been my focus for over a month. I feel that if I do not take the plunge and do projects like this I just skim the surface and do not do enough of my language arts instruction well.
Teaching reading remains the most rewarding and challenging part of my job. Whilst the focus in third grade is reading to learn, I am still very much the teacher who is helping students learn to read with reading levels ranging from first to sixth grade. Working on an MA in Reading Education is such a valuable experience. It is making a huge difference to how I strive to reach those children that we all want to ensure do not fall through the cracks during their school life.
I am looking forward to getting lost in some great books this summer because by then I will have completed my graduate degree!
Karen Massey-Cerda