Crystal

Certified Tutor

I had a unique childhood, in that my family and I moved every two years or so. I have lived in Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Alabama, plus South Korea and China. I love to travel and one of my life goals is to go to all seven continents. So far, I've traveled some in Asia (South Korea, Japan, mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand). I intuitively incorporate things I've learned about other cultures into my teaching and strive to help my students understand there is a BIG world out there, with a lot of amazing things to learn about.

I received a Bachelor of Science in both Early Childhood Education and Elementary Education from Evangel University. I am certified to teach Early Childhood (preschool to third grade) and Elementary (first to eighth grade) in the state of Missouri. I taught kindergarten in private and public schools for fourteen years. After that, I earned my advanced TEFL-C certificate (Teaching English as a Foreign Language to Children) and traveled to China to teach ESL (English as a Second Language) to children aged three to twelve. After returning to the U.S., I started teaching online. I taught ESL online for four and a half years, I have taught online reading classes and kindergarten prep classes since 2019, and I have been an online reading tutor since early 2021. My favorite subject to teach is reading, especially to lower-level students, beginning readers, and pre-readers. I believe all students are capable of learning, albeit at different paces and in different ways, and it is my job, as the teacher, to figure out how best to help the student reach his/her academic goals. It is important to me to individualize instruction, to use a variety of teaching methods, and to form a trusting bond between myself and the student that will help him/her feel safe and eager to learn. One of my goals as a kindergarten teacher was to instill a life-long love of learning in my students, in order to provide a strong base for their academic future. Even when not working with those just starting school, I still focus on forming relationships with my students so I can discover their learning styles, help them understand it's okay to make mistakes as they're exploring new topics, and encourage them to keep growing academically because there's always more to learn.