We are very pleased to announce our first Chambana Teacher to Know, Tiffany Blackmon. Thank you to Champaign Chrysler for honoring our local teachers! Do you want to nominate our next teacher to know? We would love to honor as many teachers as possible, so please fill out our simple nomination form.
Some people know all their lives that they want to be a teacher, but that wasn’t the case for Tiffany Blackmon. As a child, Blackmon wanted to be an orthodontist. The Carbondale native, who was raised by a single mother who was a preschool teacher at HeadStart, received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 2003. She went to graduate school intending to become a juvenile parole officer, but after the first semester, realized that teaching is where she wanted to be. Blackmon has spent her entire eight-year teaching career in Champaign at Barkstall Elementary School, mostly teaching second grade.
Tiffany’s nominator, Evangeline Pianfetti, wrote: “I believe that she approaches each year with new energy and new ideas, and focuses on the students in her classroom, determined to give them the best learning experience. Her teaching style combines traditional methods of learning with project-based approaches so that all students in her class have an equal chance of learning and engaging with knowledge.”
“While I didn’t always know that teaching was my future, I now know it is where I was meant to be.” – Tiffany Blackmon
See why we think Tiffany Blackmon is a Chambana Teacher to Know.
Q: What is your most memorable teaching moment?
This is a very hard question for a teacher to answer! Every year is filled with memorable moments. I always enjoy seeing a lesson click with a class or watching a struggling student come to that moment of understanding. I also enjoy when past students come by to reminisce about certain activities I did with them because it lets me know that those were memorable moments for them.
Q: You didn’t always think you would be a teacher, but you’ve stayed in the profession – what drives your passion?
Children. The children are why I continue to stay. I love teaching them and watching them learn. I like being around kids and talking to them. Plus education is always changing. While I may teach the same general topics each year, I never teach the exact same way each year. Each year I have to mold myself into the teacher my class needs, it doesn’t work the other way around.
Q: How do you incorporate service learning into your teaching?
I think that it is important for students to know that there is more to the world than just them and their friends. And that no matter what your situation is, there is someone worse off than you somewhere out there. So a couple of years back my team and I decided to incorporate service projects into the school year. We began by collecting school supplies for a school in Chicago and trial size items to make holiday bags for a local nursing home.
Last year I took a small group of families to the Eastern Illinois Foodbank, and we spent a couple of hours packing food. From that I decided to have a food drive to collect food for the Foodbank. This fall my class project was the MS Walk. My class collected spare change for Paula’s Pals MS Team and also participated in the walk. The kids raised $136.40 for the walk! I was so proud of them and they were proud of themselves!
I’m always looking for service projects for my class to participate in, so if anyone out there knows of projects that second graders can participate in, please let me know!
Q: What is the 100 book club?
One of my goals as teacher is to put kids on the path of becoming avid readers. At the beginning of my six-week summer break, I challenged myself to read 100 children’s books over my break. I wrote the title and author of each book down once I read it and jotted down either a short summary or how I might use it in the classroom. After completing this challenge, I then decided to have my students compete the challenge as well. My hopes is that the pursuit of 100 books would an exciting goal to meet, as opposed to reading a certain number of minutes per night. Whenever a student hits the goal, they join me in the 100 book club. Two students joined the club in the first quarter and I’m excited to return from break to see who else has joined!
Q: You communicate with parents in various ways – what precipitated that and how has worked for you?
A few years ago I was participating in the Chancellor’s Academy over summer break. During a breakout session there was discussion about class websites. I tried to create a class website and found the task daunting and exhausting. Plus, what if I did all the work and no one visited the page? But I knew I wanted some sort of communication with parents other than a newsletter, so it dawned on me, why not a class Facebook page?
I love having the page because I can post photo albums and daily updates of things we do in the classroom. Most kids go home and say nothing about all the neat things their teachers plan for them. The Facebook page allows parents to see that there was more to the school day than lunch and recess! 🙂
Thank you once again to Champaign Chrysler for honoring our local teachers. Do you want to nominate our next teacher to know? Please fill out our simple nomination form.