Homeroom: Sarah Budlow's kindergarten classroom is ready for a year of "firsts"

Sarah Budlow, GED'23, loves teaching kindergarten.

“There’s so much growth from the beginning of the year to the end, when they can read and write,” she said. “I get to be there when they have so many aha moments!”

But Budlow, who is in her second year at Muñoz-Marin Elementary in North Philadelphia and her fourth as a teacher, didn’t always know that she would be guiding some of the littlest learners. The dance and public health and human behavior double major said she graduated from the University of Maryland with a lot of interests but no clear career path. (And the fact that she graduated—virtually—in that first locked-down spring of the pandemic certainly didn’t help.)

In the year that followed, she tried out different jobs—census taker, election volunteer, restaurant worker—but the one that felt most comfortable was teaching dance at a socially distanced summer camp for the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore.

“I had done a thesis in undergrad about performing arts in urban education spaces, and I [enjoyed] teaching dance, so I thought, ‘Maybe I should apply for Teach for America, because it combines a lot of my interests?’ But I hadn’t really considered being a teacher before that.”

Between her Teach for America assignment in a second-grade classroom at KIPP’s West Philadelphia Elementary Academy and her concurrent night classes as part of Penn GSE’s Urban Teaching Residency (UTR), Budlow realized not only that she wanted to work in education, but that she could make the biggest impact on the youngest students.

“They are so excited once they learn that they can do things on their own, because when they first come to class, they don’t know how to tie their shoes and they maybe sometimes need a reminder to go to the bathroom,” she said. “The first thing a lot my students tell me is, ‘I just want you to know, I don’t know how to read.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s OK, that’s the whole point of this year. We’re going to learn together.’”

During the first week of the new school year, as she prepared for her 15 new kindergarteners, Budlow welcomed us into her cheerful, sunlit classroom to share some of the items that have meant the most to her on her journey in early childhood education.

Read the full story in the fall/winter issue of Penn GSE Magazine.