Arlene Birt

I am so thankful to have a job that doesn't feel like a job. I feel very blessed to be called to teaching and to love what I do. I am in my 30th year teaching first grade at Ephrata Mennonite School, where I also enjoy being the Curriculum Coordinator, serving on the accreditation planning team, and sometimes being involved with secondary school activities. I teach Sunday School and Bible School and do home-school evaluations. Reading, gardening, sewing, crafting, babysitting, and traveling are other areas of interest. One of my goals is "to know Him and to make Him known" and I aim for that in my teaching and pray that my students may see Jesus in me.

Online Resources for Lesson Planning

Teacher Vision: lesson plans, graphic organizers, section on adaptations and modifications Teachers.net : Lesson plans and ideas from teachers; search by grade level or subject area, chatboards for teachers EDinformatics :...

Online Resources for Speech

American Rhetoric : text, audio, video speeches of historical figures and on current events History.com/speeches : collection of audio and video speeches, by theme and period The Guardian has a collection of speeches from world...

Reading/Language Online Resources

MySpellIt : “Words You Should Know,” commonly misspelled words, word lists, and exercises to go with words WordCentral : an online student thesaurus, has a spelling robot. SparkNotes Classics : the actual text on the left side of...

General Teacher/Student Online Resources

Discovery School’s Puzzlemaker : Online tools for creating various types of word and number puzzles for students to do EducationOasis.com : tips, graphic organizers EducationNation.com : news, forums WikiSpaces : Make a wiki with...

NEWS

Yesterday we tried the response technique of NEWS. I wrote NEWS vertically on the whiteboard and some of the children noticed right away and wondered, “What is news?” I said we will use that to remember our day and see what we...

Taking off! Going up! On your Own!

Taking Off! Going Up! On Your Own! is a lesson Arlene Birt developed for kindergarten and 1st grade combination class. The document contains instructions for using a rocket theme to help students track their reading, writing, and...

Study Questions for Aarons Civil War

This teacher-created resource helps students offers eight questions or tasks to guide students reading Aaron's Civil War (CLP, 2011). Tasks focus on enhancing understanding and integration of the material.

Senses Lessons

From the author: I had developed this originally for a VBS week. I used it then for VBS and then several years later made some adaptations and used it again for VBS. Then I worked on it some more and shared it when I did a Bible...

Math Tricks

Rounding, fractions, percentages, and more: this 2-1/2 page document offers tricks and ditties to make teaching math faster and more fun.

Peace Unit

I developed the original unit for school and used when we took a day for Peace studies. I adapted it for VBS then. This is a shortened version

Prayer Unit

An outline of a unit Arlene Birt developed on prayer.

Anabaptist Hymnal Study Guide

Created for use in an Anabaptist history class, this document follows the development of song among the Anabaptists. The song references are for Anabaptist Hymnal by C. Fretz, 1990.

Altar Stone Lessons

This unit for devotions or Bible uses Bible stories where a stone or stones are used to remember and to remind the people of a promise or of something God had done. The lessons invite students and teacher to reflect on times in...

Devotions Lessons

These three lessons focus on creation and God's name in the Psalms; the feast of God's word; and the power of speech. The lessons were developed for school devotions and Bible School, and would be useful in any Bible teaching...

Drawing Lessons

In these lessons, students learn drawing by studying five ways of seeing: seeing line, seeing spaces, seeing proportions, seeing perspective, and seeing values. The author includes activities for studying these five ways, and...