Month: February 2024

Ahhhh…. Reading Week. A welcomed break from the hustle and bustle of everyday school and learning life.

This week has offered some opportunities for catching up, reflecting and even a trip to the USA with my kids. Don’t get too excited for me – I live as close to Minot, ND as I do Regina, but there is lots to see and buy in Minot that you will never see or buy in Regina!

First (and always) stop? Qdoba. Never been? I liken it to a Mexican subway. It never disappoints.

{Check out the size of that bowl! How many avocados do we think are in there?!}

Second stop? Hobby Lobby. Never been? Think American version of Michael’s. I decided I really wanted to see the beads I planned to use for my project in person rather than ordering online and being disappointed in colours, sizes, etc. Hobby Lobby did not disappoint in their bead supply options! Look at all of the beautiful colours! And they were on sale!

I ended up settling on a small selection of multi-coloured beads rather than choosing individual tubes of colours. To get started on an actual project I would consider showing others, I do believe these beads were a good choice. But, I also think I will be stopping at Michael’s during my visit to Saskatoon to grab an even bigger selection of beads should this next beading attempt go well.

Once I got started with the new beads, I was interested to find the inconsistencies in sizes in these beads as well. There must be a trick or a “best source” that seasoned pros use! My second attempt definitely went better than the first, but I’m still slow as molasses in January (so glad it’s not still January!) when it comes to working with beads and thread and felt, etc, etc! I do feel like this process would get easier and I will get faster once I’ve practiced this craft some more!

I don’t love the colour pink, but I’ve decided I’d like to try to bead an animal using the pattern I found previously, and I wanted to save my greens and blues. Here’s the petal I completed with my new glass beads. It’s a very slight improvement, but blood wasn’t shed, tears weren’t shed and no bad words were expressed….out loud, anyway!

This week I decided to try out smore to chronicle my learning project progress. I’m not very brave when it comes to technology or learning new apps or websites, but my school uses smore for our newsletter so I thought I’d give it a try.

Honestly, I didn’t love this platform.
There are lots of templates to choose from that others created and shared in a number of different categories, BUT you have to work around the information they’ve used in the newsletter as well as the format they’ve created.
It was difficult for me to edit the first template that I chose which caused me to be frustrated (when I was already frustrated with my learning project!) so I ditched one template and started a new, blank newsletter.

Progress is saved automatically, which is great, but I didn’t like that there was no ‘preview’ option. I like to see what things are going to look like before I hit ‘publish’! I also wish there had been an undo button when I accidentally clicked and dragged a section that I had completed and never was able to move it back to where I thought it belonged.

With your free account, you only get to create three free newsletters before it asks you to upgrade.

The cost isn’t cheap, but if you planned to use it regularly then you could probably justify the subscription. And, with regular use, I’m sure the entire site and process becomes easier to navigate and edit.

I do think that this tool could be used in the classroom to create fun weekly or monthly newsletters to send to families. The template I ended up using was suggested as a classroom newsletter and provided space to add photos with descriptions of what was happening in the classroom. My school already uses this platform to communicate our monthly school newsletter to families, but it would also be easy enough to use as a classroom communication tool.

There are plenty of options to add links to your newsletter, some templates even had moving graphics embedded in them. You’d never move up to the top of the SAMR model using a tool like this, but with adding in different links or including videos or inviting parents and students to view documents where they could edit to provide feedback would at least move you off the shore!

As for my learning project process, please make your way to my newsletter, created with smore, to reveal the blood (literally) and tears that occurred this week.

It’s pretty interesting the sources of inspiration and help one can find when they are least expecting it. After doing some more research into needle sizes and bead options for my learning project, I was feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Excited still, but overwhelmed. So I decided to do a little more digging into ideas for patterns  and colours – the things that would make this project manageable and winning for me. Ahhhlong came a beautiful post with basically exactly what I needed for inspiration and templates to use in the classroom!

Although I still plan to start “small” with a simple beaded flower, these animal designs are patterns that I look forward to gaining enough confidence to try beading something as intricate!

Thanks to living in a smaller, rural centre, options are incredibly limited for crafting supplies (amongst other things!). As much as I like to shop and support local, sometimes that’s just not possible when it comes to specific tasks such as the beading project I’ve chosen to pursue. Amazon has been my go-to when it comes to searching for necessary supplies and the price is right, Bob!

Fingers crossed that my supplies show up soon (nobody is trusting the UPS tracking any day of the week!!), but in the meantime I will be watching videos on different beading methods (I had no idea there was going to be so many suggested beading methods. Yikes!) and using my paper guides to map out the colour schemes I plan to use.

Looking forward to getting started on this project and sharing some actual photos from my real-life progress!