Cottier, petite and trim, zips around her tidy classroom, decorated with colorful bulletin boards and dollar store curtains. When she reads, “Mice Squeak, We Speak” with her 20 students, she moos and oinks as enthusiastically as the kids. Her voice rises and falls to hold their attention, and she generously praises the children surrounding her.

Watching Cottier, it’s hard to imagine that she hasn’t always been a teacher, but it’s a relatively new career for her.

Born in England, she moved to the United States when she was a young adult and headed for California, where she married and had a son. Out west, she taught exercise classes and worked in a pharmacy, selling cosmetics to celebrities.

Cottier’s husband urged her to make a change, however, when she and her family moved to the New York metropolitan area in the early 1990s. Cottier had been volunteering in her son’s school, and she found the classroom environment exhilarating.

As soon as she graduated from Manhattanville College with her bachelor’s degree in education, Cottier began teaching at Public School 6. She has taught at the elementary school for the past nine years and cannot imagine ever leaving. She earned her master’s degree at night from Western Connecticut State University.

“I love to see kids’ faces when they first begin to read,” Cottier said. “They’re beaming – their little faces light up.”

Carmen Valle, parent coordinator at the elementary school, recommended Cottier for teacher of the year award. She saw Cottier tutoring children before school, during lunch, and after school. She observed that Cottier set goals for her students and helped the children reach them. Valle said that Cottier’s annual chick hatching project and her eagerness to work in the school’s garden with the children show her dedication and commitment.

“It’s only first grade,” Valle said, “but that’s where education begins.”

Many of the students who start school in Cottier’s classroom in September speak Spanish at home. They have a limited vocabulary in English.

“They don’t know what a crow, a porch, or a barn is,” Cottier said. “The city is all they know.”

Cottier’s spring chick hatching project is part of her effort to enlarge her students’ world. She picks up the eggs at the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Valhalla and carefully keeps them warm in her lap on the drive to the Bronx. The students turn the eggs in the incubator, make booklets about the chick’s developmental stages, and learn the difference between chickens, ducks, and turkeys. The kids love to sit in a circle on the classroom rug with the chicks in middle and watch them dart about, huddle, and peck. The children cry when the chicks are old enough that Cottier must return them to the farm.

The greatest challenge for Cottier is to help all the children in her class excel. One little girl in Cottier’s first grade, considered at-risk, could not write her name when school began this year. Cottier taped story books in her voice for the student and gave her a special spot in the corner of the classroom to listen to them.

“Now she points to the words, as she listens to the stories,” Cottier said with a smile of satisfaction. “And she is writing her first and last name.”

Susan Aker, Cottier’s supervisor, said that Cottier provides the most effective instruction for every single child.

“She really loves the children,” Aker said