Travel Review: Ultra Minimalist Travel
What products would you hate to be without if you lost your luggage? If you have been following me for some time, you know I’m a huge fan of travel and carry on bags. I have mastered the art of of packing light for a long adventure. My items multi task, and I like to think I’m a minimalist, but I see no need to try ultra minimalist travel. Turns out the airlines wanted to test that theory this summer. I had crafted my packing list and prioritized what I could fit into my backpack (weighing 18 lbs or less) and a laptop bag for a 3 week European adventure. Saving my crazy travel story of cancelled flights for another time, let’s just say “I saw Europe, I saw France, and the airlines kept my underpants!” I truly became an ultra minimalist when I had to survive with one pair of underwear, a change of clothes, and just my liquids bag when my carry on bag, checked at a destination, got lost. Of course there is travel insurance to cover lost things, but what about when you hit the ground running and don’t have time to shop for basics or…
Start Tutoring and Start Earning Extra Income
What are your roadblocks to earning some extra income as a tutor? What is standing between you and some extra cash? Time? Tools? Training? Need a few extra tools in your kit to feel confident tutoring clients? We each have unique talents and areas of expertise that others need help with. Everyone can tutor something! Now is the perfect time to get set up to start tutoring this fall. My free workshop Tutor Toolkit will push aside the roadblocks and get you going! This short helpful workshop will give you the tools needed to design and individualize tutoring sessions no matter what you teach. What’s in the FREE workshop Tutor Toolkit? In this workshop, I lay out the plan to setting up an hour long session, whether you are teaching, tutoring, or coaching. You get a behind-the-scenes look at my own tutoring sessions and learn from my years in and out of the classroom. You get customizable templates for sessions and the confidence you need to tutor or coach clients, whether you have teaching experience or not. You get tips and tools for remediation, extending lessons, and building rapport, plus games and brain break suggestions. No waiting for the workshop…
Travel Review: Food Tours
What is the best way to get to know a new town? Food tours are a great way to get to know a new town. Want to get the lay of the land, a quick history lesson, and some restaurant suggestions? Take a food tour on your first day of vacation. Want to see your hometown in a new light? Take a food tour. Want a fun date night with friends? Take a food tour. Our first food tour was a free food tour by foot in Washington DC on a family vacation years ago. We were hooked! Since then we have gone on food tours on vacations across the globe, always delighted with the tours and the tourists. On a typical tour, you will meet at a designated spot to start and end your tour. Your tour guide will give a brief welcome and let the guests introduce themselves. It’s fun to hear whether people are local or just visiting. Usually, the tour is a leisurely walking tour of the town, visiting 4-6 restaurants within a few hours and a mile or two of distance in total with some history of the town or restaurants thrown in. Some restaurants…
Work From Home
What are your best reasons to work from home? Freedom to travel and flexibility in my daily schedule are the two biggest benefits of working from home. While I loved being a teacher, I love being a private tutor, business owner, and resource creator even more! Working from home has been a life-changer for me! We each have reasons and roadblocks when it comes to working from home or changing careers. Not everyone can or would benefit from working at home. But have you ever considered the possibility? Or have you ever considered working for yourself? Have you ever wished you could do your job a little differently but your boss isn’t on the same page? Working for myself and working from home has allowed me the freedom to individualize instruction for my tutoring clients. I get a chance to tailor a session to the needs of my client. I love it when I can see the lightbulb come on for a student, where learning and confidence meet. These are things that were possibly inside the classroom but not as individualized or as often as I wanted them to be. The health needs of my aging parents and grandfather ultimately…
Book Review: Road Trip Book Lists
Where will you go this summer? Bethany House Publishers produced an annual “Road Trip Guide” for seven years where they suggested books to read based on the settings. It’s such a clever idea! Summer beach reads abound, but what about those who vacation in Montana or India? There’s a book for them too! Grab a book set in your vacation destination, childhood home state, or bucket list destination and take a book vacation. The blog post has links to past road trip lists as well. While everyone is waiting in line to get the newest books, grab copies of these books online or at your local library and take a road trip to a new or favorite place! Where will you go this summer? Want other book reviews? Check out these posts. Got some book suggestions for summer travel? Post in the comments below! Table Talk: What was the destination of your favorite childhood vacation? What destination is on your wish list? Like this post? Share it with a friend! Facebook Email Pinterest Print
July 4th Fireworks
How will you light up the sky on July 4th? July 4th is a day on every calendar, but is everyone celebrating life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with fireworks? America’s first birthday celebration was July 1777, during the Revolutionary War. They were fighting for the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Bombs bursting in air do not usually give the same delight as fireworks yet both are a celebration of independence. Both types of fire light have lit up the sky for years as people fight for freedoms. Fireworks have been a common method of celebration across the world for centuries celebrating weddings, wealth, holidays, and patriotism. Fun fact: more than $300 million in fireworks are imported into the U.S. annually. Celebrating July 4 with fireworks and cookouts is a way of practicing happiness. It’s celebrating the finding and fighting for joy in everyday life. It’s about birthdays and dreams. The preamble to the American Constitution says “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The pursuit of…
Product Review: Uptime Robot
Do you have your own robot working for you yet? Uptime Robot is a free website monitoring service that works so you don’t have to. This business tool is my secret weapon. Uptime Robot checks your website every few minutes to see if it’s up and running and notifies you if it’s down. Downtime happens to the best of us, but hopefully, you can catch it before your customers do. Just this week I was trying to find the menu and hours of a new business but I got an error with every link I tried. Bummer. When I visited the restaurant that day, I let them know and they thought I just had the wrong link. It was up and running today, but using a service like Uptime Robot could have saved them egg on their face. It takes just a few minutes to set up this free service and you can choose to receive an email or text message when your website or course page is down. Plus their smart team of robots can monitor all sorts of other things for you, except what’s in your fridge or when you are running low on basic supplies like…
Strategies to Reinforce Learning
How can you reteach or preteach topics during school breaks? Summer is a great time for parents or tutors to reinforce learning when there’s less academic stress or pressures of homework, and here are 4 strategies to reinforce learning that work across all grade levels and all abilities. Teaching vocabulary – Reinforce the vocabulary and languages of the standards. Review vocabulary from the past year or get a jump start on the upcoming year. If the student cannot understand the big words in the test or assignment question being asked then they probably cannot answer the question very well. If they KNOW what the question is asking, it will be a better test of their knowledge. Struggling students will learn so much of the lesson through just the key vocabulary. If the unit does not come with a list of vocabulary words and definitions, try googling a vocab list for that topic. Chances are they are pretty available. Print a copy of the words and definitions. Print a second copy and cut it apart. Have the students match words and definitions even if you need to limit it to sets of 2 or 3. Build confidence by starting at their…
Summer Balance For Kids
How many days will it take for you to first hear “I’m bored” from your kids this summer? Finding the summer balance between commitments and boredom is a tricky thing each year, depending on the age of your kids. Much needed rest after a busy school year is essential for both parents and kids, but many kids find it hard to occupy themselves after a few days. Some parents want to avoid this and sign their kids up for too many commitments during the summer, exhausting both the kids and the chauffeurs. Here are a few tips to help your family find summer balance for kids. Pick a few commitments wisely. Nothing wrong with a summer camp or two. Consider researching a few that your child might like and letting them pick one or two, not every week of summer. The same goes for recreational classes. Ask your kids to prioritize their top few interests and go from there. If budgets are limited, consider hosting a camp week swap with other families. You plan one fun theme day at your house, complete with lunch and activities, then another family hosts the next day, and so on. Easy and inexpensive themes…
Multigenerational Travel
Planning a multigenerational family reunion this summer? Multigenerational travel is not as difficult as it sounds if you remember a few tips beyond just agreeing on the budget and location. The rewards of multigenerational travel far outweigh the planning. We are just returning from a week at the beach with multigenerational family and friends. Most of us love the beach. The rest enjoy getting away, being with family, and swimming at the pool. This beach house had something for everyone, plus lots of bedrooms and bathrooms and two main gathering spaces. My best friend and I brought our families plus our moms. Choose a location that has lots of bedrooms so everyone will have a quiet place of their own. Sometimes bunking a single grandparent and a child in a room with twin beds is quite a good arrangement. You know what works for your family. Asking the grandparent first is a good idea. Consider stairs and elevators when you are taking older generations or those with wheelchairs and baby strollers. Many things are doable for a night or two, but longer stays need more thought for mobility issues. Most rental houses now have detailed floorplans available so you can…