our team

Because of the small size of our school at this time, Our Team consists of 2 amazing founding educators, Kim Hawkins and Nicholas Watson. Both Kim and Nick are part of our amazing team who serve extraordinary children with Dyslexia, ADHD and Non-Traditional Learners at The Academy GA in Marietta, Ga.   

Through the use of Project Based Learning (PBL) I have been able to engage students in critical thinking, an integral part of learning that can sometimes be forgotten in a world of preparing to pass a test. In my PBL classrooms, students have experienced collaboration, communication, and had the opportunity to express their creativity. These experiences are not only skills that employers are looking for, but because the work is relevant to the student’s world, the knowledge is encoded into their long-term memory bank. As a bonus, PBL is fun and students enjoy it!

While PBL is the heart and soul of my existence as an educator, I realize students cannot be successful at PBL if they don’t have the core foundations in literacy and math. My realization that phonemic awareness and phonics needed to be taught explicitly, led me to acquire my certification with Orton-Gillingham, (OG), a structured literacy program similar to the Wilson Reading Program. As an OG instructor, I have used a variety of multi-sensory learning strategies to help all students. However, my students who struggled with phonics, fluency, and/or comprehension benefited most from the daily, explicit, multi-sensory teachings that OG provided. As a co-taught classroom teacher of students with a large range of academic struggles, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, I saw my OG efforts really boost student reading development. 

I am confident that The Academy "Way" of teaching and learning will produce the successful academic achievement and success of our student population. I look forward to leading this charge. Our Team at The Academy GA serves extraordinary children with Dyslexia, ADHD and Non-Traditional Learners in Marietta, Ga.