Annapolis Kindergarten Teacher Wins Agnes Meyer Award

In Julie Rice's classrooms, vines hang from the ceiling, monarch butterflies are emerging from their caterpillar stage, Chinese dragon kites dangle overhead and bugs chirp during lessons.

"Walking into her classroom, you are immediately engaged in wonder," said Lara Bontempo, a parent volunteer at Germantown Elementary School in Annapolis, where Rice teaches.

Rice's career has taken her from Britain and New Zealand to schools across the Washington region, most recently to Germantown Elementary. For her work there, Rice is being recognized with an Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award. She and 19 other teachers from the region will be honored tonight at a banquet at The Washington Post in the District. Winners each receive $3,000 and a Tiffany crystal apple.

Rice, who was reared in Princeton, N.J., said she developed a love of learning early in life. She and her two brothers had an exceptionally imaginative childhood, she said.

"My brothers and I had a seven-story tree house with trap doors, secret codes and everything," she said. "We'd make up all sorts of stories and just played with our imagination all the time."

While studying education in college, she won an award to study abroad. That would prompt her to travel frequently throughout her career.

At St. Mary's College in the Cotswolds area of England, she encountered the British methodology, which concentrates on discovering each child's passion. The school's approach taught her to engage children in areas besides verbal and math.

"Students are eager to share their learning experiences because of her ability to accept students where they are and then instill in them the confidence to grasp challenging concepts," Walter Reap, principal of Germantown Elementary, wrote about Rice in a letter nominating her for the Agnes Meyer award.

In Charleston, S.C., during the 1980s, Rice created an environmental education program to teach kindergartners about the rain forest and preserving the environment. When renovation started at a school where she was teaching, her students launched a campaign to save oak trees from being chopped down.

Her curriculum on the environment took her to Belize one summer to research the rain forest as part of her graduate studies.

"I thought I needed to go see it so I could have real-life adventures and stories to bring it all to life for the children," she said.

She received a master's degree from the College of Charleston, where she was hired as an adjunct professor in the early-childhood department. Her research on literacy rates took her to New Zealand, which had some of the highest rates in the world.

A few years later, while teaching in Fairfax County schools, she turned her classroom into a travel agency, where some children pretended to be agents taking calls while others built model airplanes. Meanwhile, their parents, representing 15 nationalities, spoke to her classes about their native countries.

"It was a way to teach by engaging children through things they're interested in, rather than simply lecturing with teacher talk or giving them a sheet to fill in alphabets A, B, C," she said.

When she arrived at Germantown Elementary two years ago, the school already had a Master Gardeners program. Through that, she helped create a butterfly garden for her kindergarten class. This year, the children will learn scientific terminology such as abdomen, thorax and chrysalis. They will learn about the life cycle, write stories about butterflies and create butterfly music and dances.

"Rather than just sitting at their desks reading about butterflies, they can be out observing, learning and interacting with the world," she said. "That's what creates a lifelong learner, which is my ultimate quest.

"It's a fascinating time to be working with children now. In today's society, children have to be creators, innovators." she said. "Education has to be about thinking, not just repeating what other generations have done for so long. You just hope the magic of wonder never ceases."