About Me

Hi y'all! My name is Ali Smith and I'm a senior at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. I am studying Early Childhood Education with an emphasis in English as a Second Language. I will be graduating in May 2019. Upon graduation I will be getting my Master's in Curriculum & Instruction: Language and Literacy.

I am originally from Dallas, Texas. It's about 45 minutes from TCU. I have 2 brothers, Will and Dean. Will is my older brother and Dean is my younger brother. I also have a dog, Paisley. She is an 8 year-old Maltese.


Currently, I am student teaching at an elementary school in Aledo, TX. I'm in a third-grade ELA classroom. The third graders in my classroom are bright, charismatic and kind. I've loved getting to work with them, alongside my cooperating teacher. I will miss them during the month of February, but I know they will be hard at work while I'm gone! The next three weeks I will be student teaching at a Montessori school in The Hague, Netherlands. I'm looking forward to this experience and cannot wait to share about my adventure abroad!

I'll be posting weekly updates about my classroom in The Hague, so please check back to read those.

All About Me


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Hallo from Holland!

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My first week at the Valkenbos Montessori school was wonderful! We have a great mentor who introduced us to the school and his classroom. The main classroom I'm assigned to is a bovenbouw group of levels 6-8. These students are 10-12 years old, or Grades 4, 5, and 6 in US schools. However, I have the opportunity to be in middenbouw and onderbouw classroom as well. The Motessori structure is very different from that of public schools in the US. The middenbouw classrooms include levels 3-5 and ages 6-9, and the onderbouw classrooms have levels 1-2 and ages 4-5 (Kindergarten). This week has been very busy! I was able to visit all three levels and really got the opportunity to see how the children of various ages interacted within the classroom. I spent the majority of my time in the bovenbouw classroom this week, so I thought I would focus this post on how the bovenbouw classroom operates. The students in the bovenbouw classroom are very autonomous, as the majority of the students
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My three weeks at Valkenbos Montessori have been such an amazing experience. I loved that I had the opportunity to visit all three levels of classrooms. This really allowed me to see the growth and development of students in a Montessori setting from start to end. The number one question I was asked was, “What is different from the Dutch school and US schools?” This is kind of a challenging question to answer because I’m not exactly sure if the differences are solely because of the difference in education systems, or because I was in a Montessori school vs. a traditional public school. However, I’ve learned some amazing methods/strategies I want to take with me to my classroom. 1.      Let children roam around the room more while working. In my classrooms in the US, students work differently than the children in the Montessori school. It’s much more natural for children to move around than be confined to a desk the entire class period. There are times whe
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