LifeChanger of the Year Nominee Profile

Jessica Caceres was nominated anonymously.

To create a positive classroom environment, Ms. Caceres starts by making her classroom feel and look like a safe and inviting place that kids want to come to every day. From the beginning, she fosters a sense of community with her students, demonstrating love, respect, and understanding for them and their education. Students are there to learn, most importantly, so she is sure to set reasonable expectations that will allow for a great year.

She does love to incorporate rewards in her classroom for hard work. One of the popular prizes is lunch at the school. She includes small group time in her classroom. This is one of her favorite parts of the day because she gets to know her students more and hear about their stories. She also loves to have fun with her students. Between learning and instruction, they laugh, tell jokes, and engage in brain break dances together. She also loves to capture moments from the classroom and share photos on Seesaw with families.

Ms. Caceres' most pressing need is a class set of magnetic letters (on the magnetic tray letter arch). Phonics is key for students to read, and having a class set of magnetic letters would allow every student to engage with letters in a visual and tactile way as they work on identifying letters and sounds, blending, segmenting, isolating, and manipulating sounds in words.

Ms. Caceres published a children's book during college. She served on the English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum writing team with Keller ISD. She has been the team lead at her current school for the past three years and also serves as the Kindergarten hybrid math teacher. She recently completed her tenth year of teaching. She is also the campus UEA representative and has held this position for the past two years.