Meet our sixth-grade teacher

With years in our LifePlus community under her belt, Mrs. Annie Platt now joins our school staff as our sixth-grade homeroom, language arts, and western geography teacher and our fifth-grade science and social studies teacher. She’s had fifteen years of experience in education systems in the United States and China, including her time at our Wuhan Yangtze International School, our Yantai International School, and our International School of Qingdao before her arrival in Tianjin last year with her husband, Mr. Andy Platt, our Instructional Coach, and their three sons. “We’ve gotten to taste a lot of different flavors of all the LifePlus schools, which we enjoy. They’re all very different, and they’re all very special. They all have great people,” she says. “It feels like coming home, coming back to the LifePlus schools.”

Initially, Mrs. Platt traveled to China for a study abroad program, which is where she first met her husband. Following their graduation, they chose to teach English in Xi’an, “and China just sort of got in our blood,” she says. “We really enjoy Chinese culture and have made so many great friends over the years.”

While growing up, Mrs. Platt was steeped in a family of educators. Her mom is a teacher as were all her grandparents and a few of her great-grandparents. Yet until she taught in Xi’an, Mrs. Platt doubted she’d enjoy working in the academic field. However, in finding she had a love of teaching, she returned to university to receive her master’s degree in education and in curriculum and instruction from George Mason University. With a passion as well for history, social studies, geography, and culture, she also has a master’s degree in history and is eager to use this knowledge in her fifth- and sixth-grade classes. “If you had given me a choice of classes I could teach, these are classes I would have chosen.”

For fifth- and sixth-grade students, she finds, it’s an opportunistic time to begin engaging in deeper questions and challenging them with ideas, to look at ideas from different points of view and dig further into their meanings. “I want to spur their curiosity. My favorite question is ‘why’.”

She promotes this spurring of curiosity and encouraging students to ask ‘why’ in all subjects, which creates an exploratory and personalized sense of learning. In geography and history, Mrs. Platt invites connections of interest into the subjects. “Whether kids are interested in military or the clothes and fashions or the material culture or the architecture, we can find different aspects for kids to be excited about, and so, I like to sort of figure out the kids’ interests and sort of attach what we’re learning to [their] interests.” In language arts, students “are really concerned about good and evil, and so, you get to read A Wrinkle in Time and talk about good and evil.” Within the science and social studies curriculums, there are hands-on activities which thoroughly engage students in experimentation.

To bring this developmental learning home, Mrs. Platt encourages students to read. “Kids who read, including listening to audio books, it develops their vocabulary. It develops their reading comprehension, and it helps them understand people better. Kids who understand stories are able to enter into other people’s emotions better.”

She also advises parents to find ways to continue conversations with their children. As examples, Mrs. Platt plays ball with one of her sons, walks or runs with another son, and is willing and open to answer big questions with another son.

We’re thrilled to welcome Mrs. Platt to our team. Fifth- and sixth-grade parents, take the next step in meeting her at tonight’s Open House.