About Me

Hi there! My name is Valerie and I teach 2nd Grade in beautiful Franklin County, Virginia. I consider myself to have bloomed where I was planted, so to speak, born and raised here nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and between two lakes (Philpott and Smith Mountain Lake). This is my 13th year teaching elementary school, with my first three years in special education and the rest in K-2 classrooms as a regular ed teacher. Last year I began teaching an Autism-Inclusion classroom and have a wonderful co-teacher with me full-time. We taught first grade together last year and this year looped up to 2nd.

Born in '85, my generation grew up alongside the internet. Anyone in my age bracket would likely agree that most Millennials have a love-hate relationship with technology. On one side, we are grateful we were raised without Snapchat, but also were the first to create -and delete- MySpace pages. As an adult my iPhone is strapped firmly in my hand (there's the love), and I do have a Facebook account, which is mostly used to sign-in to accounts on other websites (unique passwords fall firmly in the 'hate' category) but lean more toward Instagram for personal use (@valerieandelsie for mostly pictures of me and my dog), Pinterest for lesson-planning (and sharing memes with my sisters), and Adobe Cloud programs for creating my own lessons and activities. I used Powerpoint for several years and then discovered Illustrator, which is my go-to program for nearly everything. I also have this blog, as well as a few others I update sporadically (for crafting, for church-related lessons, and the most recent, a look at my adventures in Autism Inclusion).

I also sell resources on My TeachersPayTeachers site. I prefer Apple over Windows and as proficient with technology as I think I am, I still struggle with some programs, like ActivInspire, which I use with my classroom's ActivBoard. I am a firm believer in Googling anything that can be Googled and have no fear when it comes to learning something new. I don't personally enjoy coding, but I have been learning more about it in order to help best teach Virginia's Computer Science standards to my students.