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All About Me

Welcome to second grade! I am glad that you are part of my class this year.

I have known that I wanted to be a teacher since I was seven years old. I went to college upstate and finished in about three years. After that I started teaching in a fifth grade class. I received my Master’s degree in Literacy from C.W. Post. In addition, I have completed 60 post-graduate credits. I have been teaching here in Smithtown for six years now and I love it. I also teach professional development classes on poetry, critical thinking and literacy to other teachers. Just this year, I have also become an adjunct professor at Adelphi University. This has been one of the most fun and rewarding teaching experiences I have had so far!

A few years ago, I received the Western Suffolk BOCES Model Schools Teacher Integration Award. Our class was acknowledged for the excellent work they had done using technology in our classroom. This was such an honor and I am excited to continue of the path of technology integration in the future. We have also been honored three years in a row by the Suffolk County Reading Council for our outstanding poetry writing! Second grade is a very exciting place to be!

In my spare time, I love to write poetry, to read and to learn new things. I love to travel and I plan on visiting many new places over the next few years. Just this summer I got married! You'll notice I have a brand new last name. We had a great time and you can see some pictures from the wedding on this page. I started to take ballroom dancing classes which I love! I also enjoy working on this website and researching various topics that pertain to our classroom environment and promoting students' learning. The poem that appears below explains some of my educational philosophies.

The Gift in the Struggle

One day a man saw a butterfly
shuddering on the sidewalk,
locked in a seemingly hopeless struggle to free itself
From its now… useless chrysalis.

Feeling pity, he took a pocketknife,
carefully cut away the chrysalis and set the butterfly free.
To his dismay, it lay on the sidewalk, convulsed weakly for a while and died.

A biologist later told him, “That was the worst thing you could have done!
A butterfly needs that struggle to develop the muscles to fly.
By robbing him of the struggle, you made him too weak to live.”

-Anonymous

We are going to do a lot of amazing things this year in second grade. We are going to write poetry, create beautiful published books on the computer, create solar system brochures, play a lot of different math games that will help you understand numbers, and write our first research reports about amazing animals! You can even look at some of my past students' work on the blog on this website! I have many great things in store for us this year, so be ready to work hard and to have some fun!

Ms. Spucci's Class
Smithtown Central School District