Stop and think for a moment about what makes your job easier as a teacher. There are some things you can control, but there are plenty you cannot. And so you are left trying to do your best with the tools you are given.
This got me thinking about all the teachers who stop me on the street and ask me, “Just how good a value is MyMailbox Idea Center Gold? Should I subscribe?”
My answer is always an emphatic, “Yes!” Sure, I work at The Mailbox and Idea Center Gold is one of our services. However, the single essential part of my job, the thing that all of The Mailbox employees think about in everything they do, is how to improve the quality of learning of children and, by extension, how to make a teacher’s job easier.
Since today is the first day of fall, let’s take a look at some of the tools you’d have at your disposal if you were an intermediate-level Idea Center Gold member today.
– Simply typing in the word “fall” delivers over one thousand resources, which can then be sorted with a simple click. How about twenty-seven center ideas? Or one hundred and one craft projects? Eight games your students can play to reinforce learning? Over two hundred worksheets and writing pages? Twelve teacher tips right for the season?
– Perhaps you need something more specific for math instruction? Type in “order of operations” and voila! Fifteen ready-to-go skill builders. And, if you want to reinforce graphing skills, you have one hundred thirty resources to chose from, including eighty-eight worksheets.
– This fall, we’re introducing new resource collections so you can quickly find our top activities for such topics as place value and journal writing right under your cursor.
– We’ve gathered our most popular interactive-whiteboard-friendly graphic organizers in one place too! Go to the Idea Center Gold Toolkit and you’ll find timelines, character comparison charts, KWS sheets, and idea webs that you can use in front of your whole class.
– Finally, we are hard-at-work on a number of new tools, including a Spelling List Activity Maker so you can create your own weekly vocabulary lists and assignments. Create it, print it, and save it to your computer as a pdf.
If I were still hunkered down in my classroom, facing a tidal wave of autumn lesson planning and trying to figure out how I was going to get it all done, there’d be nothing better than a one-stop-shop like Idea Center Gold. All those upper elementary resources for $59.95 a year? And I get a digital version of The Mailbox magazine? And access to The Mailbox Solutions blog, where I can get help with sticky classroom problems from other teachers? Call me crazy (it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard that), but I think it’s one of the best values in education today.
Do you have questions about MyMailbox Idea Center Gold? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll be happy to fill you in.
After reading this, I think that I may need to sign up for Mailbox Gold. I really like the regular Mailbox and all the ideas it has. This sounds really great to me.