About Bethany Meekins

Contact Info:
School: Alliance Academy International, Ecuador
Email: bmeekins@alliance.k12.ec

About Me:
Bethany was born in Queens, New York (USA) April 16. She spent her early childhood and young adult life moving around Long Island, Queens, and the Rockland County Area. In 2008 she moved to Ecuador to teach at AAI as a English Language Specialist for the Early Education Department. She married in June of 2009.

In her free time she is working to complete her Masters. She enjoys riding horses, bowling, hiking the mountains of Ecuador, travel, and most recently knitting! In between such activities, she daydreams about earning her PHD in Psychology and opening a home for domestic violence and sexual abuse victims from the Quito area.

Professional Responsibilities:
Bethany is currently is responsible acting as the English Specialist for the Kindergarten level during the first half of the day. As such, Bethany has restructured the Langauage Arts curriculum for Kindergarten to account for the rapidly increasing needs among the population of English Language Learners. Furthermore, Bethany is the afternoon Kindergarten teacher for one of the kinder classrooms. She is also responsible for restructuring and planning the Social Studies curriculum for the Kindergarten classrooms and was recently asked to take over teaching these subject areas to both kinder classes.

Mano a Mano project I'm Working On: Bethany is working to develop a series (3) of parent workshops. These workshops will be used to increase understanding of developmentally appropriate family activites supportive of literacy development for young children. Through these workshops it is expected that family involvement will also be increased.