Elkmont High School sophomores Mackenzie McCart and Rose London-Lane won a Future Teachers of Alabama "Grow Our Own" award earlier this month.

Mackenzie McCart and Rose London-Lane, two aspiring teachers from Elkmont High School, won the Future Teachers of Alabama’s Grow Our Own competition earlier this month.

Grow Our Own is designed to promote teaching in the state, the importance of becoming a teacher and to encourage more students to consider teaching as a career choice.

In order to compete, the two Limestone County Career Technical Center students had to prove to contest judges that they could successfully teach a prepared lesson to a group of third-graders for 45 minutes.

Over a two-week period, the sophomores worked together to build a lesson plan using skills they learned from their Teaching and Training instructor, Tara Hilliard Ellis.

Ellis prepares students like McCart and Lane for careers in education by teaching them the ins and outs of leading a classroom. Ellis also recently started a student-teaching program that sends students into local elementary schools for the chance to teach children a full lesson.

McCart said she and Lane were already involved in the student-teaching program but wanted to challenge themselves so they asked Ellis to enter them into the upcoming Family, Career and Community Leaders of America competition. Unfortunately, the FCCLA competition is in March, right around the time Ellis is due with her first child.

Not willing to disappoint her students, she started looking around. She stumbled upon the Alabama Education Association’s Future Teachers of Alabama competition.

Ellis said the parameters of the contest “hit the nail on the head,” requiring participants to develop a lesson plan, teach the lesson to actual third-graders, provide supplementary materials such as worksheets and administer a quiz at the end to measure retention.

“That is exactly what we do in class and what teachers have to do every day,” Ellis said.

In order to fulfill the contests requirements, McCart and Lane agreed to build their lesson plans around the theme of “thankfulness.” McCart was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer last summer, and although her prognosis is good, she said the disease taught her to “be thankful for everything” — a lesson she wanted to pass on to Piney Chapel’s third-graders.

They enlisted the help of Elkmont’s yearbook committee to film them while they taught the class, a requirement of the competition.

“Some of the students weren’t fully into it,” McCart said. “But I definitely could tell that a couple of them had a better understanding of what it means to be thankful after our lesson.”

Before they could submit their video to the judges at FTA, the duo had to edit the footage from 45 minutes down to nine.

The video clearly impressed the state judges, who selected students from three Alabama schools as winners of the FTA Grow Our Own award. The LCCTC team will travel with their teacher to Montgomery to be recognized by the Alabama State Board of Education on March 8.

“This was an amazing experience for them, and it will look amazing on their resume,” Willis said. “Prospective colleges will see that they conquered something at such a young age and were recognized by the AEA for it.”

Both McCart and Lane plan to pursue careers in education after they graduate from college.