Our next Featured Teacher is Carol Polston over at The Chocolate Teacher
Carol is in her 23rd year of teaching. She has taught mostly first grade with a few years of second and kindergarten sprinkled in here and there. Her love is definitely first grade. Her favorite part of teaching first grade is seeing the growth in her students from the beginning to the end of the year. This growth never ceases to amaze her. She feels blessed to be able to be a part of her students’ growth!
Carol has been married for 38 years. She and her husband have three grown children and two adorable grandchildren. An unusual fact about Carol is that she had the privilege to teach all three of children in first grade. Her older two children she taught as a homeschool teacher and her youngest child was in her 1st grade classroom in public school. She feels happy that she got to teach all three of them how to read! Her youngest daughter is now also a teacher (teaching P.E.- a love she did not get from her mom).
Carol loves teaching just about every subject (ok, maybe not P.E.). She especially loves to teach phonics and reading! Grammar is also a subject she enjoys teaching. Carol started creating phonics and language units to sell on TpT a little over a year ago. She enjoys creating units to use in her own classroom and to share with others. The first grade classrooms in her district use her phonics and language units. You can click the links below to see a few of these.
She also enjoys providing activities to get her students up and moving as they learn. To encourage this, she has created Write the Room activities. These activities are a bunch of fun. Students move around the room looking at cards that are pinned to the wall and they record their answers on an answer sheet. These are a highly anticipated activity in her class. She has created quite a few to go along with her weekly phonics skills. You can check out her short vowel word family bundle here:
Carol also just completed a beginning mapping unit. She used it in her classroom and the kids loved it. The culminating activity in this unit is a map skill lap book. You can see it here:
Carol has quite a few free products in her store. Here are two that you can try that will introduce you to her phonics units and Write the Rooms:
Are you wondering why she named her store with the unusual name- The Chocolate Teacher? You can read all about why she did that here:
You can follow Carol at these sites:
Thanks so much for taking the time to read about Carol.
