Appletastic Learning By: Shelly Rees
email: shellyrees94@gmail.com
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Appletastic learning is a website created by Shelly Rees that is dedicated to expanding the educational community. Her goals are to reach out to new teachers, find new activities and lessons to teach in her 5th grade classroom, and share her own ideas and educational products with teachers of many different grade levels. She is extremely active on social media (listed on the left) and has embraced expanding her personal brand. Not only does Appletastic Learning has a website and a blog, but it has a pinterest, facebook, and teachers pay teachers site all dedicated to sharing new and exciting content as well as some pretty entertaining education based joke photos.
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Through exploring Appletastic Learning, I discovered something I had yet to see on some teacher blogs I have reviewed. I discovered a sense of humor about the profession. Not to say Shelly does not take education seriously. She is immensely dedicated to her students, so much so that she is constantly updating her social media across all platforms she uses to share her work and find work from others that she can use and adapt to help her own students. What I mean, quite simply, is that in addition to showing her passion for the profession, she shows the funny side. She shows the side that we all remember from when we first starting feeling that urge to teach. From the silly things first graders say, to our mutual dream of having our classroom set up for us so we can get more than 5 hours of sleep before going to school again, she brings in a sense of fun about the classroom that makes it relatable. Instead of being a strictly professional education blog, Appletastic Learning makes me remember that even though we need to find new ways to incorporate that world event into our lesson about fractions somehow and that common core is still a hot debate across the country, we all can use a good laugh about the universally funny things that happen to us as elementary teachers.
I found through exploring her past blog posts, that I related to Shelly pretty quickly. I love that she brings in her past experiences, her advice for new teachers, and I especially related to the realization that playing school as a child and being a real teacher are not quite so similar. Being a teacher is hard. It's rewarding, it's amazing to see done well, but it is hard. There is a lot of work associated with teaching, and as a new teacher, it can seem overwhelming. Luckily, we have all been shown time and time again that there is a wonderful community surrounding us as educators and we are not alone in this. Bottom line is, I think this blog is great. I think it has a great balance between serious content and teachertainment (it is my right and my duty as a teacher to make up dorky sounding words) making for a pleasant read alongside some great classroom ideas. If you haven't already, check out this wonderful blog.