About Me: Heidi McDonald
This is a picture of me at the door of my classroom.
Welcome to my website!
This website is the result of turning lemons into lemonade….
About two years ago, I submitted a proposal and sample teacher resource book to a big name educational publishing company. My resource book was not even glanced at. Instead, I was sent a standard letter saying that I needed to have a literary agent representing me in order for my work to be looked at, or considered for publication.
Since I live and teach overseas, I knew that this would be a hard task for me to accomplish. I was very disappointed, but I felt that when I moved back to the United States in a few years, that I would pursue this dream again. In the meantime, I felt that the best thing that I could do with my time and effort was to focus on developing more teaching resources, so that hopefully I could get them published sometime in the future.
I was not the only faculty member to be treated in this manner by my principal, so I tried not to take it personally. Instead, it drove me to work very hard on creating my own teaching resources that were unique and engaging to my students. I would come home from teaching and work late into the evenings, and long hours during my weekends and holidays, trying to come up with new resources to use with my students that would stand out from traditional worksheets. I stayed after school for hours working on my classroom displays and grading papers to help my students improve their reading and writing skills. I realize now that I was driven and pushing myself so that my principal couldn't even find a paper clip out of place in my room to chastise me about. Although I was always on my principal's "hit list," whenever our school had important guests that were visiting, she always brought them into my classroom as an example of a classroom that she wanted to show off and that she was proud of.
I am no longer teaching at that school, thankfully, but these two experiences have shaped who I am as an educator today, and why I have started my own website. Because of the long hours I put in on my computer trying to create educational materials for my students, I have a lot of teaching resources that I have been asked to share with other teachers.
With the advancement of the Internet and more and more teachers searching on the Internet for teaching resources, my sister suggested that I use the Internet as a vehicle to distribute my teaching resources. Instead of selling the rights of my materials to a big name publishing company, I would then have total control over my work and how I develop my website.
I have served as an English department coordinator before, but I found that I did not enjoy “administrative” work. I began to realize that I had no aspirations to work in administration or become a principal. I did not want to hold department meeting, require that lesson plans and unit plans were due in at a certain time or in a certain format, and I did not want to be in charge of assigning teachers extra work to do beyond their enormous workload. On the contrary, I wanted to help teachers lessen the burden of their workload and planning time by providing them with refreshing and unique teaching resources to use in their classrooms.
If you have found the teaching resources on my site a helpful supplement to your current curriculum, I would appreciate it if you would refer my website to your colleagues. I know that if you have found this site, you are a teacher who is dedicated and takes your own time outside of school hours to find supplemental teaching resources to use in your classroom.
I will be adding teaching resources to my website on a regular basis, so please check back here often. I will be starting a monthly newsletter soon that will keep interested teachers informed about the new resources that I add each month, as well as useful teaching tips and ideas.
I hope that the materials that you find on my website save you time in planning your lesson activities, because we all know the long hours that teachers put in working well after their students have left for the day!
Thank you for visiting my website, and always remember that our profession is one that comes from our hearts.
From my heart to yours, Heidi McDonald
This is a picture of me on my last day of teaching at a school in Bahrain.
This is a picture of me and my Grade 5 students in Jakarta, Indonesia.
In this picture, I am at a school in Bahrain on "crazy hat day,"
This is a picture of my family celebrating my parents 50th wedding anniversary. My sister, Heather, is a playwright and college
This is a picture of me with my parents, Jack and Ruth McDonald. They live near Daytona Beach, Florida and my sister and nieces live near Baltimore. The hardest part of teaching overseas is missing my family so much.
I love scuba diving and had the chance to dive throughout
This is a picture of me in Cozumel taken by my Dad.
Heather and I took a three week "sister holiday" to India
In my "younger days" I back packed through
When I lived in China, I didn't have a car and had to bicycle everywhere.
This is a sunrise hike up to Mount Bromo, an active volcano in Indonesia.
Finally, a picture of me on holiday in France.
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During that same time, I was working at a school under an administrator who could never say a positive word to or about me. Although my students loved me and their parents were very happy that their child was in my classroom, I was treated with disdain by my boss. I would often come home from work in tears and frustration because of the way that I was treated at work, but this only made me try harder to make my next lesson or project for my students even better. 
I am thankful now for this teaching experience because it taught me to have confidence in myself and my love and dedication to teaching. The long hours that I spent on my computer experimenting and learning have paid off enormously for me, and most importantly, for my students. 
It was like a light bulb went off in my head. The possibilities were endless, as well as my dreams. So, that is how this website started, and how I turned my lemons into lemonade. 
I have always had the “travel bug” and I applied to teach overseas after my sixth year of teaching. I have now been teaching overseas for the past 15 years in a variety of international schools in China, Indonesia, Kuwait, and I am now teaching Grade 4 in Bahrain. I have had a variety of experiences teaching students who have learning disabilities and students whose first language is not English. In supplementing the curriculums that I have taught, I have always strived to reach the needs of all of my students, while making reading and writing fun and challenging at the same time. 
Here are some photographs to give you a "snapshot" about me. I'm 42 years old, and although I am just 4 feet 11 inches tall, my life has been very large and I've been very fortunate. When I decided to teach overseas, I was able to travel to a lot of places that I had always dreamed about. I've been able to teach students from around the world because international schools are filled with children from a wide variety of countries. I have also been blessed to work with talented and dedicated teachers from around the globe.
