It’s the first day back to school for lots of teachers and kids today. There’s returning teachers as well as first year teachers still learning the ropes.

Amanda Stonerock is a first year teacher at Elsie Rogers Elementary School in the Penn Harris Madison School district. She’s looking forward to teaching her second graders, starting today, “I am the most excited about building relationships with the students.”

She says that her goals, “are to help the students become active participants in what they’re learning,” she says, “I want to help them learn that they are mathematicians, they are readers, they are writers…”

Although it is her first year teaching, Stonerock says that she gets a lot of support from veteran teachers at her school, “as I new teacher I don’t know if you know what you’re going to come across,” she says, “going into the day being open to anything and finding the best solution for everything… it’s why I have a mentor.”

Kara Flanagan is starting her 7th year teaching first graders at Elsie. She says that there’s a mentorship program for new and returning teachers to partner up and help each other

out, “for any of the new teachers that come in, they get paired up with a teacher that’s been here,” she says, “there’s lots of questions you don’t know to ask.”

Flanagan has a bigger class size this year, with 26 students, and has new changes that she wants to incorporate in her teaching. She says, “teachers are lifelong learners and every year there’s new methods, new ways to scaffold the kids’ needs.”

For both teachers, one major reason for being in the classroom stands out, the kids. Stonerock says she has, “a love of children.”

Flanagan agrees, “I want to have the opportunity to make a difference in these kids’ lives.”