Fry, Mayhew join Cooper staff

Fry
Fry

When students returned to Cooper Elementary School last week, they were met by nine new teachers, including Carol Fry and C.J. Mayhew.

Fry isn't really new to Cooper Elementary. For her, Cooper is home and the staff is family. She's happy to be back.

After helping to open Cooper Elementary, Fry took a job as a literacy coach at R.E. Baker, another elementary school in the Bentonville district. She's been gone two years.

She returned to Cooper this year as a fourth-grade teacher specializing in literacy and found some of her former first-graders entering fourth grade. She teaches literacy to both third- and fourth-grade students.

She wanted to return to the classroom to gain experience in the upper grades, she said. During her 22-year career in education, she taught kindergarten and first grade most of the time. But she's been studying literacy for all the elementary grades at Columbia University and wanted to apply what she learned.

A national board certified teacher with a master's degree, Fry's studies at Columbia's Reading and Writing Project are not part of a degree program. She just likes the training and is ready to apply it again in the classroom.

The biggest difference between the first-graders she used to teach and the fourth-graders she has today is chapter books, Fry said. By fourth grade, students can read longer, more complex books. There's more character development in chapter books, she said.

Of course, that means she had to expand her classroom library. She had a comprehensive library for first grade, and now she is adding higher-level books. She'll have more than 1,000 books for her students to use when she gets her library completely set up.

"Kids need variety," she said. Her library covers a range of reading levels and interests. She has both fiction and nonfiction.

Fry has two children, and one lives in New York City. She stays with her daughter when she travels to the Columbia project. Fry is also a caregiver for her mother, and that leaves very little free time. She does like to go out to eat whenever she can.

The newest teacher at Cooper, Mayhew, just moved to Bella Vista from Missouri. She was hired right before school began when a kindergarten section was added at the last minute.

She's been teaching kindergarten in the Kansas City area for most of her nine-year career. She likes kindergarten because that's where teachers lay the foundation for a student.

During those years, she has seen a change in kindergarten with more emphasis on academics and less on social skills. But children, she said, still need to learn social skills. At Cooper, the PE4Life program helps fill that void, she said.

Her own two children, a kindergartner and a first-grader, attend Cooper.

"They love it here," Mayhew said.

When they aren't at school, the whole family enjoys being outside -- running, biking and swimming.

General News on 08/27/2014