Hello all! My name is Candy Mooney and I wanted to share a little bit about myself. I have been teaching for 20 years in the Surry County Schools and I have loved every moment, well, almost every moment. I have had the good fortune to work with children throughout the kindergarten to sixth grade spectrum and have gained much insight. I recently moved back to a first grade classroom after seven years with fifth graders and I have to say it was a real adjustment both physically and mentally. My time in this program has reminded me that good teachers are always learning.
I am the wife of Scott Mooney and the mother of two children, Emma (16) and Caleb (12), that keep me moving. I also love animals and have three dogs, one St. Bernard and two Pomeranians. We all live on a farm with horses on one side and cows on the other. I enjoy gardening, walking in the woods, watching my kids play sports, and baking.
I have been a part of this Reading Program at Appalachian since 2008 and this is my last class before I graduate and to be honest I am getting very excited. It has been a real journey.
I began this program for several reasons the primary one being my personal difficulties with language. In spite of having a home where I was surrounded by reading and I struggled with print and the meaning of text until I meet a teacher at nine who had the patience and a real understanding of the interrelation of my problems. I had difficulties in spelling reading, and I had some speech issues. I I loved stories and desperately wanted to be a reader. I carried a book with me everywhere that I went. I'm sure I "wrote" a hundred stories from that one book. I was an excellent math student so Mrs. Chambers approached reading in a systematic way and shared with me the patterns that we find in print. She started me on a diary that I continued through high school and made a much needed speech referral. She also allowed me to tape myself each week and allowed me to see that I was making progress. During this year with Ms. Chambers the secret code was revealed and with it my drive to read more.
In my own teaching career I have found along the way students that have similar problems and I used many of the approaches that were used with me but I wanted to be better equipped to guide them through this process.
Candy Bodenhamer-Mooney