Lehman Graduate is Big Apple Award Recipient

Congratulations to Nila Johnson, 2016 Big Apple Award Recipient!

Nila Cadornigara-Johnson, graduated from Lehman with a MSED in Early Childhood in 2006. She is now a Pre-Kindergarten teacher, at 1199 Future of America Learning Center, Fordham Manor (64XAPN). Enjoy the video above of as Nila’s colleagues and students recognize her achievements with love and pride.

Nila Johnson has 20 years of experience teaching in New York City schools, in addition to her years teaching in the Philippines and Nigeria. She draws on this wealth of experience to ensure her lessons resonate with her pre-kindergarten students. Ms. Johnson’s classroom is structured around Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, with different immersive environment areas such as a music studio, a publishing house, and a sushi house to engage students’ varied interests and learning styles. Ms. Johnson carefully monitors her students’ choices during center time, and designs instruction to include materials that cater to their interests and lives. That means a lot of hands-on learning, from bringing in chopsticks for students to practice with to an investigation of high fructose corn syrup in which the class studied its physical characteristics, met a corn farmer, and worked with parents to investigate their refrigerators at home to locate food items with high fructose corn syrup. Ms. Johnson carefully evaluates each students’ strengths and areas for growth at the beginning of the year. For a classroom of four- and five-year olds, success can be defined very differently from student to student, but as Ms. Johnson explains, “For my students, success is confidence.”