Hannah Strauss

Hello everyone, hope you all are having a great summer so far! My name is Hannah Strauss. I just finished my third year of teaching Special Education in Oldham County. My certification is in Elementary Education as well as Learning and Behavior Disabilities P-12, but my love is in working with my babies (K-2) J My first year of teaching was a bit interesting being split between two different schools (Goshen and Harmony) for both special education as well as interventions, but since then I have found my home in one school, Kenwood Station Elementary. As I mentioned before, my love is in working with the babies, K-2^nd grade, and I am hopeful to continue to be with the same age group next school year!

Recent/Current Reads

These past 6 months have been full of reading textbooks for multiple Master’s courses, however I have had time to read some books on my own time. While I don’t particularly enjoy reading the non-fiction found in textbooks, I do enjoy reading non-fiction texts about healthy eating and living, exercising, cooking, etc. Being a part of a book club has helped me to branch out and read books I maybe wouldn’t have picked on my own. A few book club books that I have really enjoyed reading lately have been The Hunger Games and Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang.

The Sugar Solution is a book that I chose to read on my own these past 6 months. The reason I picked this book is because I am very interested in healthy eating habits as well as trying to keep my triglycerides under control. Unfortunately, due to my families history of diabetes, I need to make sure to keep on top of my genetic tendency to have a hard time breaking down sugars. I felt that this book helped me to see which foods helped in this endeavor and which foods continued to raise my risk for high triglycerides.        

A Little About Me

I have spent my entire life in Kentucky, more specifically Louisville and the surrounding areas. I was born and raised in the Highlands and moved out to Oldham County after a little more than a year of commuting up and down 71 to work everyday. My husband and I, who have been married for just over a year, bought our house with enough land (about an acre) for our two dogs, Sadie (Austraillian Shepard Border Collie mix) and Bella (Golden Retreiver) to play! I enjoy playing with “the girls” as my husband and I refer to our dogs, spending time with friends and family, cooking, sewing and DYI crafts, reading, and being outdoors. 

 

Literacy In My Classroom

Even though this past year was my third year of teaching, I feel like there are always new things that I am learning and implementing into my classroom. This past year I implemented a model into my classroom that follows many of the same techniques used through the Reading Recovery approach. As a special education teacher I was able to see tremendous growth out of my students through this approach. While I typically just work with the babies, our team each took a fourth grader and implemented this approach with them one-on-one. My fourth grader was reading on a 2^nd grade level at the beginning of the school year and by the end she was on grade level! I have never seen so much growth in one year and the confidence that this gave my student was tremendous. This student was allowed a reader for KPREP and only used it a time or two when she was running out of time because she was so excited that she could do it on her own!

One area that I feel that I under taught this school year was the proper use of reading strategies. I spend a lot of time teaching my students according to their IEPs and there just isn’t enough time left over for the strategies. All of my students K-2 are at different levels with different goals (basic reading, reading fluency and reading comprehension) and it seems like by the time I make sure I am addressing each students needs, it just gets overlooked. The only time and of the reading strategies are addressed is on Friday’s when I do a group read aloud and we do pre, during and post reading discussions about the book.