A dream come true.

That’s how Savannah Horton feels about her new position as the pre-K teacher at Warrenton Elementary School.

“Ever since I was little I’ve always wanted to be a teacher,” she said.

Horton is the only pre-K teacher at Warrenton, but she receives help from her teacher’s aid Jenophia Truitt. She also gets help from other pre-K teachers in the district who she has met with for advice.

“It’s nice. I’m the only pre-K teacher here at this school, but we still meet as a district with all the other pre-K teachers, and I’ve gotten a lot of help through them,”  said.

She interned in a kindergarten class, and from that point she knew she wanted to teach younger children the first building blocks in their educational careers.

“I liked all the routines and teaching them the basics, teaching them the foundation,” she said.

Horton graduated from Mississippi State University with a degree in elementary education in December 2014. For the past year and a half, she was a third grade teacher at Vicksburg Intermediate School.

“I started in January of 2015,” she said, adding her students’ tests results were good with more than 85 percent passing their Gateway test. “It was a good year last year.”

She was given the option of teaching kindergarten or pre-K when she made the move to Warrenton over the summer.

“I told him either one would be fine,” Horton said.

Pre-K has a structured curriculum setting out what the students need to learn.

“We do have a curriculum that we have to follow. It’s not just coming to school to play. We do play but through learning,” she said.

Her goals for the class is to teach her students about letters, number and she hopes to get them started reading.

“We go over our alphabet and our numbers. Hopefully by the end of the year we’ll have some reading. We’ll go over sight words and different themes throughout the year,” Horton said. Her favorite part of being an educator is watching them learn and grow as the year progresses.

“Especially with pre-K. I can see the kids don’t know their alphabet or their numbers and then hopefully by the end of the year they’ll be able to just recite them,” she said.

Horton hopes her students enjoy her class as much as she enjoys having them in her class.

“(I want them to) enjoy the year, have fun and just think of school as somewhere where they want to be and they want to learn,” she said.

She wants each student to develop a love for learning and a desire to continue on to kindergarten.

“(I hope they) love coming to school and want to go to kindergarten and learn even more next year because every year it builds,” Horton said.