Teaching, learning and sharing:Mash.ie

You may not know but Simon and I have two educational websites! We have anseo.net and mash.ie. Anseo.net is for all opinions, reviews and posts on education and technology. Mash.ie is a thematic teaching and planning website, designed to help teachers share and to reward teachers for sharing.

Mash.ie developed out of a question. Why don’t Irish teachers share? We brainstormed lots of ideas. Time, lack of confidence, lack of planning and lack of motivation. It boiled down to lack of motivation for me. I knew that Irish teachers were creating fabulous resources, lesson plans and active ideas to use in their classroom but they weren’t being shared as they should be. So, mash.ie which started as a purely Thematic planning tool for teachers has now grown into a teacher pay teachers type resource. We hope to distinguish from other teacher pay teacher shops by using themes for every day of the year. It will take some time for this to happen but keep checking back! Even better, start sharing the resources you have made on a particular theme.

For example, the theme of today’s calender on mash.ie is chimpanzees or Passover.  Using themes in my planning and teaching is one of the best things about primary school teaching! It sets us aside from the suffocating curriculum syllabus at post-primary level. It gives us freedom to be creative and really feel passionate about our job! That rubs off on the children naturally.

One of my passions is writing and reading. I love writing and am in a writing group in Carlow. I am obsessed with reading and read constantly and have done since I was about three years of age! I want to share this passion with other teachers and guide the next generation of readers and writers in our classroom. Big ambitions, I know but let’s think big!

My next article will be on using similes in the literacy lesson and how this can be linked to the reading and writing strand of the language curriculum. I will be looking at a simple seasonal poem that can be used from 3rd class upwards.

Until then, get uploading to mash.ie. Many teachers have made some nice income for themselves and also sharing the work that they do gives them a sense of achievement. I’m all about the personal fulfillment!

www.mash.ie

Mash was designed to help teachers make and share the fabulous resources they have. It rewards teachers for making these resources and encourages teachers to share in this way.