Every teacher needs a circle of teacher friends. You need a friend who can laugh/cry with you when a child pukes on your brand new, really cute shoes. You need a friend who understands teaching is as much about summers off (yeah right) as it is about marathon bladder control. (Holding it from morning meeting all the way to lunch. Every. Single. Day.)
You need a friend who understands that your house will look like a tornado blew through it the week before school starts (cleaning; aint’ nobody got time for that). A friend who knows the joy of finding the exact right chevron fabric to cover your bulletin boards with or who understands the insanity of heading to Walmart at midnight in a blind panic to purchase a laminator because the school laminator is out of film (again).
Most of all you need friends who will throw open their filing cabinet or open their hard drive and SHARE! Friends who can really talk about best practices, what really works in classrooms, and how to make the wonderful, amazing sounding theories presented at workshops really work in a classroom (instead of turning into a hot mess of classroom management nightmares that leave you staring blankly at the wall eating M&Ms at the end of the day). I don’t mean share a cute Thanksgiving worksheet from the internet that prints a little lopsided and is blurry. I mean a friend who will share the ancient Chinese secrets of teaching, the holy grail of teaching treasures, the BEST stuff, the stuff that really worked, the stuff that made the principal’s pen furiously write about your GENIUS teaching during a walk through, the stuff that made your teaching toes curl, the stuff that will work in your classroom also because they “get” teaching the same way you do.
At Planning in Paradise we have found each other. We are all blessed to work at a wonderful school filled with amazingly talented teachers and top notch administrators. Over the years we have come together, through a shared love of creating resources and talking about how to make classrooms really work. We share ideas, we share frustrations, we laugh a lot, sometimes we cry, but most of all we lean on one another to navigate the twists and turns of teaching as we cling on for dear life to the ever shifting pendulum swings in education.
We started Planning in Paradise because we are excited about the things going on in our K-5 classrooms and the ideas we have for making it all work. We are excited to create and share on our blog, because after all every teacher needs a circle of teacher friends!
Grab a FREEBIE below for joining our circle!
We are a group of friends who love teaching, creating, sharing, and most of all LEARNING! We are teachers of all grade levels K-5 and just want to share our experiences (good and bad) with you in hopes that it will be a positive influence in your future teaching moments!
