TPT Store Launched!

I am beyond excited to announce that I have finally launched my Teachers Pay Teachers store! Ever since I heard of TPT, I have been anxiously awaiting to make the time to create my own store. My goal is to share products with fellow teachers to help decrease their chaotic workload and bring a little clarity to their world of teaching!

Chaos to Clarity with Claire TPT Store

Tuesday Tea Time with Claire

“All You Need is Love” ~The Beatles 

Like all things in life, it is so easy to over complicate teaching. All too often, I find myself living in complete and total self-imposed chaos. I try to brush it off and call it organized chaos, but if I’m being completely honest, the reality is my organized chaos still feels like chaos. Hopefully I’m not alone in being guilty of being overly ambitious, a bit of a perfectionist, and becoming fixated on the least important mundane daily teacher tasks like...

aligning the student desks perfectly before each period...

organizing all my white board markers by color and upside down so they last longer...

rewriting learning targets and agendas on the white board until they look perfect...

need I go on...

I’m sure you get the full picture of my time consuming perfectionist tendencies...

It is a daily struggle to find the balance of having an organized, efficient, and sanitary classroom, but also not letting the little things take over your prep period to actually prepare to teach. I’m constantly attempting to learn how not to create my own self-imposed chaos.

When asked why do you teach, we usually all have a similar response because we love teaching. We go into this profession because we all want to make a difference. We all want to be the teacher that inspires the next generation. We all want to teach kids to love learning. How do we achieve such a goal? Like the wise tea bag advises, “Every smile is a direct achievement”. When our priority is to make learning enjoyable, we see a room full of smiles and magic happens! 

Cheers to realizing The Beatles had it spot on, “All you need is love”. Take a few moments to relax and enjoy your tea. You deserve it. 

Tuesday Tea Time with Claire

Connection Chaos...

Sometimes I think our job title would be depicted more accurately if they titled us as “connectors” rather than teachers. It is beyond insane how many connections we attempt to make in a day, let alone an entire school year. The connection chaos begins the moment we start prepping for our lessons. We attempt to connect all of our material to our students’ world which inevitably means we must be in tune with their world. This means we must take the time to ponder and  connect their world to what our students believe is an archaic world. As if that isn’t exhausting enough, those connections are just the tip of the iceberg in the connection chaos we call teaching. On a daily basis we attempt to...

connect content to students...

     connect students to content...

          form the teacher and student connection...

     form the teacher, student, and parent connection...

connect with ourselves as human beings outside of the classroom...

     discover we live in connection chaos...

          accept that our job is officially being “master connectors”. 

Why Chaos to Clarity?

Let’s be utterly honest with ourselves fellow teachers... Isn’t our job description taking a whole lot of chaos and magically turning it into some form of clarity?!

The words “chaos to clarity” symbolizes so many aspects of who I am as a teacher and a human being. It represents the overwhelming feeling I have each time my students and I are working together to reach the next level of understanding a concept that seems impossible to master. Each time we break through the seemingly impossible invisible wall of understanding, through a lot of time and energy, we conquer it together and we reach the all mighty level of clarity (aka the students each have their own “ah ha” moment!).