Meet Chasity Donald, a '23 Belmont alumna (Elementary Education) and dedicated first-year kindergarten teacher who shares her daily experiences in the classroom, from lesson planning to building strong relationships with students and parents. Join her on the journey of nurturing young minds and fostering a positive learning environment.
Every morning, I wake up around 5:15 a.m. to be at work a little before 7:00 a.m. Before I leave, I make sure I have my keys, my work badge and my Stanley Cup (hydration is key when working with high-energy kindergartners!). On the car ride to work, I pray for each of my students and that the Lord leads and guides me through the day. This centers and grounds me for the day.
Lesson Planning and Organization
I do my lesson planning for the week on Saturday. I have each subject color-coded in my planner, and then I use a weekly template from Canva to make my Google slides look fun and exciting. Our Kindergarten team has a long-range calendar that we follow so we can keep the same pace. I use Google Slides to teach because it helps me keep up with what comes next in the day and I can import videos for seamless transitions to brain breaks and then go right back to instruction. I make copies either during my planning for the following days or in the mornings before students arrive. I also adjust the slides for any changes in instruction that need to be made.
The first week of school, there were definitely a lot of late evenings just to get my bearings and to get together with the classroom flow. I am gradually lessening the number of days I stay late to once a week.
I have car duty after school, so right after that is over, I pack my stuff and head home. When I get home I also give myself about an hour to do non-school related things, such as watching TikTok (although most of my feed is TeacherTok at this point). I also try to leave some time to talk to my family or my friends each night.
A Peek into the Classroom
Kindergarten is challenging at the beginning because students are new to everything, and there are also A LOT of tears. Sometimes managing emotions takes the place of instructional time, and sometimes students need a lot more breaks to get up and move. So, flexibility can sometimes be a challenge in fostering a positive and inclusive classroom environment, when there is so much we have to cover by the end of the year.
Finding the balance between comforting the ones who are in tears and keeping class moving for the rest of the students is tricky and takes practice. Fostering a positive environment where students feel like they have a voice has come in the form of letting them create the rules for our classroom. Even though they are so young, they have a great sense of how to treat others and what it takes to be safe. After creating our classroom expectations, we all signed them as an agreement to say we were all going to follow these rules, including me.
To keep students engaged, I use a lot of echoing and call and response. It's fun and silly to the students, but it increases their listening skills and is a quick and easy way to maintain routines, such as putting their name on their papers.
I also love the content I am teaching, and because I am excited about what I am teaching and sound excited about what I am teaching, my students get excited about what they are learning. Even when the technology goes out, I am still excited about teaching from paper. As a teacher, you have to be able to think on your feet, so when my ClearTouch panel decides to go out in the middle of math, it's a great time to show students how we did school “back in the day.”
Finding the balance between comforting the ones who are in tears and keeping class moving for the rest of the students is tricky and takes practice.
Building Strong Relationships
To build strong relationships with students, we do morning meetings to start each day. This is a time for students to greet each other, share something about themselves, and do fun activities such as games that teach life skills such as sportsmanship or that you can’t always win.
Supporting students' needs means having a strong relationship with the guidance counselor. My students see our guidance counselor as a friendly face in the classroom rather than someone they only see when they have a problem. Supporting students' needs also means getting to know students well enough to be able to notice when they are struggling emotionally or academically, knowing their triggers, and also knowing their interests to incorporate them into support. In order to keep my students occupied and quiet during testing, I printed coloring sheets with their favorite animals. While this did take time, I love watching students' eyes light up when they know I listened, and I cared about their interests.
Handling Parent-Teacher Interactions
One challenge I was facing as a first-year teacher was handling parent-teacher interactions. I felt because I am 22 and freshly out of college, parents would not take me seriously. But I have great kindergarten teammates that provide great advice when handling parent interactions. We use a platform called Class Dojo to communicate with parents. I also made it a point during this second week to communicate with all of my families things that their students were doing well and how they are adjusting to Kindergarten. For many parents, this is their first child in Kindergarten, so this eases their minds and it keeps an open line of communication for when issues do arise.
Chasity and her classmates at Belmont
In terms of seeking out mentorship, I got really lucky, and Belmont set me up well. I am teaching now with the same team that I student-taught with, so I already had great relationships with my team and other teachers and staff at the school. Belmont also prepared me well in terms of advocating for myself and not being afraid to ask for help.
As a kindergarten teacher, every day brings its own set of challenges and joys. From lesson planning to fostering a positive classroom environment and building strong relationships with students and parents, it's a rewarding journey that I'm privileged to be a part of. And as I continue to learn and grow, I hope to inspire the same love for learning in my students that I have for teaching.
Take a Look Inside
Chastity Donald graduated from Belmont in Spring 2023 with a degree in Elementary Education.