Notes
Emily is a K teacher at Woodland.
I shared that we had three purposes today:Â to get to know one another, both personally and professionally, to discuss our work together, and to identify some successes and challenges she is seeing in her classroom in literacy instruction.
Emily shared that her hyusband is a PE Teacher at another elementary school in Olathe, and that their son, Theo, is a kindergartner there. They also have a daughter, Josie, who is two years old.
This is Emily’s 12th or 13th year in Kindergarten, all at Woodland, which is also where she did her student teaching. She teaches with Ann (another coachee of mine), her colleague now, but her building mentor when she was new. Their teammate, Danielle, is also taking this course.
We discussed what our work could look like – what coaching is and what it isn’t.
When asked to share some literacy instruction successes, she said that she has always felt most confident teaching letters, sounds, segmenting, and blending. Her whole class is at the threshold of where they should be with letter identification and letter sounds are coming along. The next step is CVC words.
They use Fastbridge as a screener, and then move to the PASI for some kids, which they use to form intervention groups. She shared that she has four kids working on segmenting and blending.
She mentioned that every day, using 95%, there is a phonological/phonemic awareness “warm-up,” which supports this.
We will meet again on Monday, 2/9/26 and talk about next steps.