Frustration! Exasperation! Overwhelmed! How am I ever supposed to find what I’m looking for? That’s how I felt when I started teaching. I was given a whole set of standards to teach, but not many resources to achieve the goals set forth by the school district and state. I spent hours scouring the web for resources. Finding available resources seemed easy until I started studying everything that looked like it might be helpful to me in my planning endeavors. In addition, how could I organize everything I located so that I could find it and use it. Further, how was I going to scaffold everything I found so that it made meaningful sense to my students? I was completely overwhelmed and annoyed.

I would find a great resource, use it, and then wonder later where I put it. Or worse, forget that I had found this awesomely terrific resource only to begin searching again and again for a way to teach the same standard, enhance upon it, scaffold it and build a complete lesson that was catered to exactly the right needs for my students in my grade level. I simply could not believe there wasn’t one place that I could keep all my plans as well as the wonderful resources I had stumbled across. I also wanted one place that I could search from that was organized and ready to use.

I’ve heard that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Well in my case this is true. I didn’t like spending all my planning time as well as free time at home trying to make lesson plans. There was simply too much information available to weed through and make sense of. I wanted one location that was my “go-to” place to find, organize and use all the lesson plans and classroom resources. It needed to be an efficient use of my time so that I could be the best teacher I could possibly be. I was there for the students to learn, not to spend all my time searching for effective lessons that I could use in the classroom.

That first year my student test scores soared, but the next year I couldn’t seem to find all those great resources again. Hadn’t I book-marked them? Hadn’t I saved them somewhere on one of my desktop files on my computer? I think some of them I had but not all. It was time for this to stop. It was time for me to figure all this out and waa-laa! I figured it out! Why not build a website to house all my teaching “stuff”! And, if I could use this, couldn’t my teacher friends also use this? That’s the stuff that dreams are made of! I was in heaven.

Then came the hard part, how do I do this? How do I mix my entrepreneurial spirit with my practical teacher side and build this thing. I needed a plan of action. I needed help. I don’t want to bore you with all the details, but what you are looking at is years of culmination, sweat equity, more frustration and finally euphoria. FileMe was born!

Now you get to reap the benefit...that’s figurative language for all your ELA teachers out there. I scoured the web to find the best possible teacher websites and added a webpage here with those that I have found extremely useful. I figured while I was at it, I just as well add a teacher store for all you over-achievers who want to take it a step further and sell your lessons to make a little (a lot?) extra money. You can also buy others fabulous ready to use plans here as well. Ok, so let’s just take this a step further and include a place for teachers to share and talk with each other on a web forum. Now we’re talking! You’ve got all the makings for the perfect teacher resource right here at teacher1stop.com. I hope you are as excited and relieved as I am. Why go anywhere else when you can find everything you are looking for right here? Become a subscriber today to save, access, share, create, and locate all your planning needs. I can’t wait to hear from you!