VIDALIA — Teachers have it easy, right?

A little more than two straight months off while their students are on summer vacation. From May 28 to August 5, they get to do whatever they want.

Wrong.

“I’m always looking for new and different ways to keep my students excited about learning,” said Virginia Easley, a first-grade teacher at Frazier Elementary.

When The Dart landed on Linden Street in Vidalia on Thursday, Easley was doing just that. The second year teacher was comfortable on her couch researching a new teaching style that she has been interested in called Whole Brain Teaching.

“Not to say that things weren’t working last year,” she said. “But I can always be a better teacher.”

Whole Brain Teaching is purely a teaching style, it in no way will keep Easley from teaching the Common Core lessons.

“It is all about keeping learning fun for the children,” she said. “This is done by attaching hand signals and sayings to classroom tasks and what the students are learning.”

A simple example that Easley gives is one she uses to get her students back on task.

“I will say to them ‘Okey-Dokey’ and they will respond together ‘Artichokey,’” she said. “They seem to take to that kind of stuff really well.”

Easley was first told about this way of teaching when she was an early education student at the University of Southern Mississippi and began to implement it in her class last year.

“It is all about positivity,” she said. “The purpose is to have each student with their own personal goals and rooting for the other students in the class.”

Easley plans on implementing her Whole Brain Teaching style on the first day of the upcoming school year.

“Preparing like this make me excited to just start the year already,” she said.