Welcome to Grad School!

    Hello! My name is Michelle Brasher. I am a 5th grade teacher at Bryan Elementary School in Kimberly, Alabama. I have been teaching for 13 years, and I primarily teach ELA.  I am so excited to begin this journey of obtaining my Master's Degree - it has been a goal of mine for a long time, but circumstances just never worked out till now! My husband Neal is a high school chemistry teacher, and we have two energetic kids, Calvin who is eight and Mirabelle who is five. I am looking forward to this new adventure and hope this blog can be a great tool for tracking the new ideas and strategies I am learning! 

    For our first assignment, we were asked to create a collage to "introduce" ourselves. What a fun assignment! I decided to use an app called Pic Collage Edu. I loved that there were so many ways to personalize my collage. I probably added too many details, but I enjoyed trying out all the features. With my 5th graders, I could definitely see this being a great way to integrate technology and get to know one another at the beginning of the year. As a reading teacher,  I can envision using something similar for character analysis, novel reviews, or even vocabulary. I think many of the items we put in our reading journals could be presented this way, such as examples of idioms or words with a certain Greek root. I am looking forward to using this app in the upcoming school year!