I love deal websites. Sure, 99% of the emails that I receive from these websites are spam to me. But the other 1% can sometimes be gold. This was one of those times.

Vistaprint [affiliate link] recently had a deal for $75 worth of stuff for $15. I’ve always thought that printing some business cards would be kinda fun, so I latched onto the deal. I didn’t know who I would give business cards out to, but I thought that it would at least be a bit of fun.

When I went to their website to figure out what I’d get, I also noticed that they had tons of other cool stuff like custom stamps! So my mind changed from business cards to custom stamps (for when I’m a teacher). So I got my creative juices flowing and started designing a stamp. I was happy with my finalised design, and I had more of my $75 dollars left than I had expected, so I designed some business cards as well (When I placed my order, Vistaprint had a sale. So in addition to using the voucher, I also had a number of other discounts applied to my such as free uploaded designs. This meant I got tons of stuff for my $15!).

A very exciting end to this story is that I received the shipment today (11 days early) and I really wanted to show off the cool stuff that I got. To begin with, here is the stamp that I created.

I was so happy with my first order that when Vistaprint did the same promotion last week, I spent another $15 to get $75 dollars worth of stuff. But I’m waiting for that order to arrive.

If you’re a teacher then I’d definitely recommend them to make a custom stamp for you (you need to design the stamp, they just print it)! And if you’re not a teacher, well, I guess you can have a stamp too if you want. Or you could get any number of different things from them. Below the break I’ve put a few pictures of the other things that I ordered as well as some brief explanations about them.

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Recently I’ve been completing my teaching internship (the final step in my education degree!), and the teacher whose class I’m in has introduced me to a great website, Storyline Online. Storyline Online is an initiative by the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, hoping to give children easy access to quality literature.

On the website you are able to watch any of the videos for free, and view resources that can be used to plan lessons around the videos. There are 24 stories available which add to a total of 3.5 hours of videos! And these are quality stories, including The Rainbow Fish, Stellaluna and The Polar Express. All read by (somewhat) well know actors including Elijah Wood, Hector Elizondo and Hayley Duff.

All of the stories are read expressively and clearly, and accompanied not only by animated pictures from the books, but also by text so that you can read along as you watch them.

As a teacher, I can say that this website has been a great way to constantly and easily expose my students to the quality reading of quality literature. And I’m sure that it would be great for parents, as it is yet another source of educational entertainment.

Definitely worth checking out.

Below is an example of one of the videos. Hope you find the site to be a helpful resource!

Have you ever heard of Tom Lehrer?

Up until a few weeks ago I had never heard of him. But in my Maths tute we were shown a video that a teacher made to go along with one of his classes about Maths (that video is after the break). I thought it was a cool resource, and it’s the type of resource that I think would be fun to make with a class. The video that is right below here is all about New Math, the idea that it is important to actually understand formulas and what was happening as opposed to just getting the right answer at the end, this song is from the 1960s. Hope you enjoy!

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Reading out loud is not something that is easy to do. In fact, out of all forms of reading, it is actually the hardest to do.

This is because when you are reading out loud, not only to you have to try and make meaning from the text, but you also have to communicate that meaning to your audience.

Before we can communicate the meaning of a text to our audience, we must first understand the meaning of the text ourselves.

I think that most people fail to realise just how hard reading out loud is, and that is because they don’t read out loud very well. What they do is just read as if they were reading to themselves, this of course would be fine if you were just reading to yourself, but if you’re reading out loud, then chances are that you’re reading to an audience. This is because when you are reading to yourself, your mind communicates the meaning to yourself, but when you are reading to an audience, you have to communicate the meaning to them.

Our short term memory can hold around 7 pieces of information, and when reading aloud we read about 3-4 seconds ahead of what our mouth is saying, and try to make meaning of those words before we say them. In that time between when our mind reads the word and the time when our mouth communicates the word, our minds are working to tell our mouths exactly how we should say that word. Can you see why reading out loud is actually so hard!?

This is what I learnt in a lecture today on oral reading, and here are a few of my thoughts on how this can be applied to reading the Bible out loud.

So what can we do to improve our reading out loud?

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In my English lecture today, we were shown a trailer for a great book, and I just had to share it.

I think the trailer a supurb commentary on our society (and the book is pretty awesome as well).