In observance of National Teacher Appreciation Week, swark.today is featuring profiles of area teachers on each day of the business week.

In a recent class, Blevins Elementary’s third-grade teacher Stephanie Alvarado leads about 15 seven and eight year olds through a lesson on cause and effect in wind turbine mechanics.

The students are given a cause, like rapid expansion of air as heat finds it, and must supply the effect. In this case, one boy eagerly raises his hand and, after Alvarado calls on him, says “It causes the wind.”

“Good,” Alvarado says and then she repeats the answer to the rest of the class.

For the next question--what does the wind cause to happen in the turbine?—Alvarado asks the students to pair up with the person next to them and consult a chapter in their sizable science books to find the answer.

Here the kids open their books and begin to search together as Alvarado roams around the phalanx arrangement of tables, offering hints to several of the pairs. Eventually, she provides a hint, the page number where the answer is. When the class seems stumped, she can show her own book, opened to the right page, to a small camera and project the image onto a screen the students face.

“So what’s the answer? What happens when the wind blows?” she asks.

At this point the answer seems to dawn, and a girl sitting in the middle of the phalanx raises her hand and hears her name called out.  “It turns the fan,” she says.

So the students are not only learning how renewable energy can be harnessed, but they are also learning teamwork, research and critical thinking.

Alvarado is in her first year of teaching third grade after having taught first grade before. It’s her responsibility to design the lessons, present them and then help her students through as they apply those lessons. The kids are locked in, mostly. One boy wears his book bag on his head for a time. But even he tries to help his friend find the answer. Alvarado is able to bring him along. The bookbag hat is off, and he is working, too.

I ask her later how she keeps her composure when the students really are being quite funny. “Sometimes I'm just like, ‘What in the world?’ And I have to laugh with them. But like, a lot of the times I have to work hard to keep myself from not busting out laughing. Because then oh, gosh, it'll cause chaos,” she says.

Alvarado clearly enjoys what she does and knows what she’s doing. I ask her when she first caught the teaching bug and she says it was while helping younger students along in dance classes and later as she actually taught tumbling and gymnastic classes in her teens. But when she entered college, her major in her first semester was undecided.

But looking back on what she enjoyed doing helped clarify things as she went further into college. So she started on the track toward teaching. In her later semesters, she became aware of what age group she wanted to work with. “We had to go to elementary classes, and I just fell in love. And I served at the middle school level and at the high school level, and I thought high school kids are probably not for me, but I love working with the younger kids,” she says.

Though born and raised in Hope, Alvarado came to Blevins to teach when she got a voicemail asking if she would be interested in interviewing for an open position for first grade and cheer teacher. She recalls saying, “’Yeah, I'd love that. Sounds perfect.’ And that was what I did. My first two years was first grade and cheer.”

When she began teaching third grade this year, it gave her a chance to see how her past students had developed. “They’re not having to be like as babied as much. They're a lot more independent, a lot more independent. I have one student who was so quiet and shy in first grade. And now he's in third grade. And he has come out of his shell completely. I love that. I love seeing them grow and change,” Alvarado said.

One of the charms, or perhaps hazards, of the job is a growing affection toward the children and knowing you will miss them when they move to the next grade. “I get so attached to them,” Alvarado confirms. “I will probably end up crying because I've had these kids first grade, and then I had them for PE and I have had them for third grade. So it's going to be difficult [to see] them to move on and leave, but I'll still see them.”

Next year, Alvarado says, her students will be introduced to Wit & Wisdom, a new reading curriculum with a different textbook which is more advanced, with more coverage of what teachers call morphology, the study of how words are formed and how words within the same language can be similar. “We do morphology every day,” Alvarado says. “We explain what the prefix is and what the prefix of that word means, what the root word means . . . and they like getting deep into those words and what the meaning of those words are.”

As the website for the program explains, Wit & Wisdom works by “providing a framework for inquiry, Wit & Wisdom helps students build rich layers of knowledge. It inspires teachers and students to experience complex texts and ideas on a deeper level by fostering the questioning spirit that will shape the next generation of great writers, thinkers, and leaders.”

But for now, with the recent return to full-time classes, Alvarado and her peers are working to get their students caught up from the loss of nearly a year of academic progress. Alvarado’s students get extra reading-related small group interactions and tutoring every day in what in the education jargon is called interventions.

Thanks to such attention, Alvarado’s third graders are now reading some quality juvenile literature, including E.B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” and Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge Over Terabithia.” The latter book, Alvardo called, “So good. . . . There were quite a few who it made them cry.”

Like most teachers, Alvarado is also working on adding to her credentials. Last year, she got her certification to teach Physical Education for all grades. But she said her first love is teaching the elementary grades.