Always a Teacher & Forever a Mom

Category: General

Paints are so messy!! – Giveaway

How many times have you cringed at the thought of your students and/or children exploring their creativity through paints and brushes? How many times have you tried to think of alternatives to art activities that do not involve so much mess and cleaning up? If you are anything like me this happens more times than you care to count, lol. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for…

Telling Time – The Hour Hand

For the last couple of months, I have been working on developing my “Telling Time” collection of teaching resources. My need to develop this collection was born out of necessity when some of my tutoring students were showing difficulties with their telling time skills. As I worked with different students I noticed a few common misconceptions.  I also came across a couple of websites and blogs…

Lights, Camera, Action! –

  This week I selected a video about teaching phonics. I have discovered Katie Garner about a year or so ago. Her videos are not only inspiring, they are also very instructive and motivating. In the video I selected for today, Katie demonstrates how to teach children about the “mommy e” rule. I use it all the time with my tutoring students (sometimes using “bossy e” instead)…

Lights, Camera, Action! – Bullying – Take 2

Remember “Daisy Chain” from my previous “Lights, Camera, Action!” post? Well, today I bring you “Dandelion”. “Dandelion” is the predecessor to “Daisy Chain” and also deals with the subject of bullying. It is a very touching short movie that will make an incredible conversation starter about this topic. Unfortunately, the authors do not allow this video to be embedded in webpages, but the movie is…

TpT Clipart Tribe Presents: Franken-Doodle-Stein Halloween Blog Hop

This past week, 12 INCREDIBLE artists from the TpT Clipart Tribe came together to create something absolutely amazing!! For the first time, we brought our skills and artistic styles together and each artist was allowed to add a unique piece to create our very own Franken{doodle}stein. (Thank you Sarah Pecorino Illustrations for putting this image together for us!)   This GENIUS idea came from an…

Make Your Own Halloween Pencil Holders

Halloween is almost here and so is the promise of candy and spooky costumes 🙂 Today I am participating in an exciting blog hop with some of my fellow Canadian teacher-authors. All you have to do is sit back, grab a cup of coffee (or tea, if you are like me), and then have fun reading our tips and tricks, downloading our freebies, and finally…

Lights, Camera, Action! – Bullying

I am starting a new series of posts. Light, Camera, Action! posts will bring you videos that I have either found online or created myself. These videos will all be teaching related.   Today’s video is one that some friends shared with me on Facebook. It is a short movie based on a children’s book, and it would make an excellent conversation starter when approaching…

Exploring the Properties of Liquids and Solids – part 1

For the last few weeks, I have been exploring the properties of liquids and solids with my tutoring group of grade 2 students. It has been quite an exciting experience! Our main goal is to produce a booklet that explains all the properties of liquids and solids. The students and I have been exploring science experiments and they have been registering all their findings. So far, we…