Woodrome has been teaching for 28 years. The past eight months have been quite a challenge.

“In the spring, our students weren’t allowed to take their devices,” Woodrome said. “So having to teach students remotely without all the same device was a challenge, but we did a pretty good job. We learned together. My families and parents and students were amazing.”

Woodrome said she spent the time out of the classroom last spring adding new tricks to her bag–attending webinars and watching Youtube videos on how to reach students. She then trained the rest of the Field staff for remote learning for this school year.

To this point, in person or remote learning is a family choice for Field students. While Woodrome’s entire class is in person this year, there are still plenty of challenges.

“I really them to still enjoy coming to school, so I started thinking of ways to make sure coming to school is still fun,” Woodrome said. “I did a lot of group projects in the past, which you can’t really do know so I had to think about ways to still do those projects and make kids excited about learning.”

One of those ways is through robotics. The school received a grant to purchase Dash robots, which the kids learn to program. Learning to program the robots creates other learning opportunities as well.

“At first, they said ‘Wait…30 centimeters? And I said Yes’ so we talked about how the floor squares could help us,” Woodrome said. “They picked up pretty quickly, but if I’d have given them a worksheet about that, they would have been like ‘ehhh’ (laughs). They had to apply it, so it was relevant to learn.”

The project this week was to create a robotic version of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, where the kids not only had to program their robots, but also decorate them as well.

“The kids have loved it. They tend to be a little scared of it at first,” Woodrome said. “They think it’s too hard, and soon as they learn ‘wait, I can do this’, we’ve just been doing weekly challenges. That’s one path I took with the robotics to try to still do exciting projects with the kids and teach them more technology.”

In one of the multiple nominations we received for Mrs. Woodrome, Mallori Hendrix, a colleague and a former student wrote, “She is the reason I became a teacher. Her genuine love for every single one of her students is unmatched. She is a ROCKSTAR at remote learning and has taught each one of her coworkers how to make it through remote learning. She goes above and beyond anything we could ever ask for and she is far more than deserving of the Most Valuable Teacher award for the week. She’s my most valuable teacher of a LIFETIME.”

If you know of a Most Valuable Teacher, let us know. You can nominate a Most Valuable Teacher here.