Sugar Hill teacher wins national award

UNDATED - A teacher from Sugar Hill is one of this year's winners of the country's top award for math and science teachers.

Leanne Luttrell is a math teacher at Sycamore Elementary in Sugar Hill.

The Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science, administered by the National Science Foundation, comes with a citation from President Bush and a trip to Disney World for the Disney Youth Education Series.

According to the Web site for the awards program (paemst.org), engaging students in different ways and getting them to seek out the answers for themselves have been integral to Luttrell's success.

To keep parents in touch with the classroom and to give students additional practice and challenges, Luttrell developed a Web site where she posts a regular newsletter about her classes.

Luttrell's Web site provides links to sites where students can practice the skills they're learning in the classroom. The site has been especially helpful for students looking to get some extra help on logical thinking activities, according to paemst.org.

"Each student poses different challenges for a teacher, but once you've gotten that student to figure out a challenging concept on their own, I've found that this newfound knowledge means more to them and stays with them longer," said Luttrell. "Communication is one of the keys to teaching. Students need to be able to talk about their ideas, and they need to feel like they are in a safe environment to test these ideas, to see where they work and where they don't."