Mrs. Youllar is a teacher I will never forget. Growing up, I struggled with reading constantly being pulled out of classes to get tested to see why I was struggling. Sixth grade came around and I was put in reading AIS with Mrs. Youllar. I was the only girl in the class with around five other boys.

She would make us read articles, on top of articles, and we annotated all of them. I hated it. Looking back now, without those articles, I don’t think I would have advanced as much as I did with my reading. She helped us while reading the article by sounding out words we were stuck on, reading it to us (sometimes), and making us stop after each paragraph to annotate and go over what the paragraph was about. And if we did it well, she would give us gold stars. Although I still don’t LOVE to read, she helped me advance my reading skills tremendously.

 Seventh grade came around and I had her again, and the same with the eighth grade. Unfortunately, after that, I moved up to high school and got a new AIS teacher. Junior year rolled around and I walked into my new AIS class on the first day of school, and she was my teacher again. And, I was the only girl with three other boys. That year she helped us more with our reading and writing. Junior year was a hard year with school work and she always made sure to put time aside to help us with any schoolwork we had, especially for English class. She also taught me to love journaling that year. Every week she made us write anything we wanted in our journals and it inspired me to do it in my free time. And the same rules applied, if we did well in class, she rewarded us with gold stars. Sometimes we just needed a break from school work and she understood that, so she let us play group games and have downtime whenever we really needed it. She was very understanding with our class that year. 

You have always been my biggest supporter from day one and I’m so thankful you wrote my recommendation letter for college. Thank you for everything you’ve done for me throughout the years, I wouldn’t have made it this far without your help.