Teaching young learners, Lisa Rost understood her job was to make learning fun. She’s done that in Homewood District 153 for 25 years. She will retire in June.

Rost has created hundreds of ways to get her young charges to remember facts and figures. “I need them to be active and thinking and creating,” she said.

What do they love to eat? Chicken nuggets! She used her pretend nuggets as things to be multiplied. The response from her second graders was: “That’s easier than I thought it was going to be.”

Learning the states and their capitals? Rost uses a short video about every state and makes a game out of the capital. For example, the action for Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital, became a batting exercise. For one science project, she used string to attach little cups to coffee filters for a parachute.

“You make it so visual for them that it’s not some foreign concept. Whatever I do, I try to think about it from a kids’ perspective and what can I do to make it make sense to them,” Rost said.

Teaching was always what Rost wanted to do. She has 38 years in the profession, having worked in her home state of Minnesota, in South Dakota, and then 13 years in southwest suburban Shorewood before coming to Homewood.

In District 153, Rost has taught first and second grades and was the Enrichment Program teacher for 15 years helping stimulate learning for kids who show talent in reading and math. They all use devices, but Rost remembers one boy who thrived on long division, “so I’d give him the biggest numbers to divide, and he’d tape papers together to get a whole problem down.”

She had a second grader who was distraught because he was behind his classmates in his reading ability. She made simple study guides to help him succeed. Then she put them all together in a “book” for him.

“He just hugged me like I just gave him the best gift ever,” Rost said of the book. Today the student can read on his own. “That to me is what teaching is,” she said.

Rost has used her skills in working with English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in her classroom and with adult learners through Prairie State College’s literacy program. She tutored one couple from Colombia for about three years, helping them with the spoken word, and another immigrant she tutored on the written word. The volunteer time “was so fulfilling,” she said.

Rost doesn’t have an outline for her retirement days but said she probably will spend some time helping with the PSC literacy program.