I have sold a few things on Teachers Pay Teachers but not much since I only have 8 items in my shop. That means that I definitely need to create more items. With all the great ideas I have creating materials to sell should be easy, but…

Today I woke up with a great Desmos project that would work across grade levels and ability levels. It would be usable as exit tickets, performance tasks, formative or summative assessments, small group project, or a challenge project. It will be a wonderful project.

So, I sat down at my computer to start. Having read Erica Bohrer’s “Getting Started on TPT”,  https://ericasedventures.com/getting-started-on-tp/, I know that having a good title page is important. I pulled up my title page template and thought, “Yuck! That font is so boring!” Of course, I had to find a better font. I opened Chrome and searched my bookmarks to find the font site I knew I had marked but my bookmarks were so disorganized that I just had to reorganize them.

After working for about 20 minutes moving bookmarks around, I got bored so I went back to finding fonts. I found the site I had used before, https://www.fontsquirrel.com/. Then I got sidetracked trying to decide if I needed to use a special font for students with dyslexia. Since I couldn’t find a free-for-commercial-use font, I went back to looking for a regular font. I chose a couple of fonts, applied them to my title page, and decided to check out how the page looked on my phone. It didn’t work – the fonts had reverted to the old style. Eventually, I realized I forgot to save the file as a pdf, had to find a way to open the pdf on my phone, fight to get the file from OneDrive only to realize that I could just save it on Adobe Cloud. Now I finally have the almost finished title page on my phone! Yay! But I used up half my day just getting organized.

So, I am making sloth-like progress on getting organized and starting to add to the website and create new resources. Even though minethestandards.com has been up for a while, I really am still just a newbie. Each time I read Erica Bohrer’s article, I see how far I must go but I also see that mistakes and restarts are a part of the process.

And right now, I am doing a restart. I am redefining the purpose of the website. Not only is the site designed to help people understand the standards, but it will also become a repository of teacher-created materials that are standard-focused. I may have to monetize the website so that I can pay bills, but right now I just want to have links to Teachers Pay Teachers or Classful or any other secure site. My big dream is to be able to pay teachers to come and learn how to create sellable resources and give the teachers time to create materials to sell. But based on my business plan, that is a couple of years away. So, I am focusing on the website and creating resources.

The resources will include:

• Math stories and non-fiction readings
• Games and activities
• Work sheets differentiated for multiple levels and interests
• Desmos activities
• Themed math units
• Eventually apps and video games

I have only started to “mine” the k-8 math standards. While I was teaching the website was only a hobby that I worked on during breaks, so it is not very far along. I focused on the 6th-grade ratios because ratios are so fundamental to all upcoming math. I will continue with 6th-grade math and add resources as I mine. Eventually, I will have the website ready to accept links to resources from other teachers. But before that, I will get back to the Desmos idea that started this whole process.

Image is from: Hendrik Kueck from Vancouver, Canada, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons