I love being a teacher. It's all I've ever wanted to do. But, it doesn't pay the bills.

Especially when you are a family of 6 and have a special needs child and 3 more accident prone boys. Within 8 months 2 of my kids had major surgery, and I was left with thousands of dollars in doctor bills.

I started looking around for an online teaching position and I stumbled upon VIP Kid.

VIP Kid is an online platform for Chinese students ages 5 - 12 to learn English. It has been a perfect fit! I have to work a minimum of 7.5 hours a week but I have the option of working more. I teach 25 minute classes and then switch to another student.

VIP Kid makes the Power Points that you use and you have 25 minutes to teach a 25 - 35 slide Power Point. I typically teach phonics with some grammar, math, and geography thrown in.

Beijing is 12 hours ahead of Indiana so I teach a 6:30 am class followed by a 7:00 am class and then I leave for work Monday - Friday. On Friday nights I teach a class at 9:00pm, 9:30, and 10:00.

Saturday and Sunday I teach from 7:00 am to 9:30 and then I teach again Saturday night. I'm teaching while my kids are asleep so I'm not missing out.

And I get a nice pay check around the 15th of the month. I'm finally making a dent in all of my doctor bills!

If you'd like to learn more just follow this link.

Don't freak out about not having an ESL license. I don't have one either. If you know how to teach Phonics, you'll be great! 

-Tracy

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The Knit Wit Teacher

I knew that this school year would be full of changes. I was moved from 4th grade to a new Transition to First grade room. I spent the summer planning and thinking my students to be lower first grade students. Turns out, it's more of a repeat kindergarten room with 11 students. I had to completely change my mindset.

At the beginning of the year I had 11 students that didn't know 26 letters / sounds. We didn't know our numbers, shapes, or colors. Not 1 student knew how to write a sentence or even how to write with spaces between words. I had 3 students that were spelling their names wrong, and 11 students that could not login to their iPads with their usernames/passwords. What we knew on Monday, we didn't remember on Wednesday. To say it was a shock would be an understatement.

I had to completely revamp my entire curriculum. I had to find resources. I had to figure out to make my schedule work. I'm just now starting to get into a routine. We are 32 days in, and I'm still not certain that my routine is working. I'm constantly making changes and pulling new resources.

So what resources am I using? Good question. I'm trying to stay away from curriculum they've already used. Instead of the new Reading Street series I'm using Reading Street 2008 and scrambling to find resources. If anyone has the weekly selection test book for Kindergarten please send it my way. The Reading Street Common Core assessments are entirely inappropriate. I want the weekly selection tests that were over the story we working on all week, but I can't find it anywhere!

For Math I'm using the Kindergarten Harcourt book.

After we finish the kindergarten book I'll move on to the first grade edition. 

I love the Scope and Sequence of this math series. I had to order 1 copy of the student workbook from Amazon and I make copies each week. But it's worth every penny! My district currently has enVision and I'm not a fan of it at all! Being given the freedom to go back and use Harcourt was a major plus. We are adopting Math this year and I hope we adopt Go Math for Indiana. It's more in line with this Harcourt series, and has a digital component. Fingers crossed! 

For some Harcourt Math resources click here. 

For Phonics our district uses Saxon. I tried to start with the first grade Saxon and that was kind of working until we hit blends. That was a major disaster and I went home in tears that day! After talking with our Title 1 Reading Instructor we decided to go back to Kindergarten Saxon. I'm only doing the last 2 days of each letter as that's more our level and will get us through the letters and onto blends/digraphs. Once I finish kindergarten, I'll go back to the first grade Saxon and start it over. 

I'm also creating digital Phonics Lessons that follow the Saxon Scope and Sequence. I plan on using these with Canvas our digital platform. It's similar to Schoology. Students will be able to annotate the slides with me while I monitor them using Apple Classroom. Stay tuned to my TPT store for these when I finish! I can't wait to share them with you. 

I'm also implementing Minds in Motion in my school. Minds in Motion is an AMAZING program that helps students with hand eye coordination, motor skills, balance, and this all carries over into the inner ear. You would be amazed at how much the inner ear has to do with student success. 

And on top of all of this I've started a second job as a VIP Kid teacher, and I'm in the middle of a basement remodel.

LIFE IS CRAZY!!

Stay tuned for a Blog post about being a VIP Kid teacher. I absolutely love it!
-Tracy

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The Knit Wit Teacher