I feel like this is the year that we are less looking forward to a new year, as looking forward to saying goodbye to the old year! But there were definitely some highlights of the year. I’m amazed at how so many teachers found ways to survive and even thrive in 2020. It meant adapting to new tools and situations, but we did it. Even if it was a very small success, we managed to pull it off.
So below find our top posts of 2020, best-selling books, and our most desirable authors (ok, the authors whose archive pages were viewed the most). Hopefully these will serve as inspiration for you for 2021 and beyond!
Feel free to humble-brag in the comments about your biggest accomplishments or favorite resources from 2020!
Best of the Year: Blog posts
- Easy Kitchen Furniture in Minecraft – I’ve played Minecraft for years, and got my young son into it recently. So one of my little projects is some really simple guides to building in Minecraft and this post took off. Good reminder to do more. By the way, if you’re interested in Minecraft resources, check out our Basic Minecraft for Kids page (also parent-friendly)!
- For some reason, distance-learning posts are popular, so this post on adapting some of my favorite warmers for online ESL/EFL classes was quite popular. It was inspired by this post by Alice and Colin on online icebreakers.
- Resources for Distance Learning was another well-viewed post. One plus side of the pandemic is that I’ve learned a lot about delivering material in different formats, and a lot of our books are now available individually or bundled, as PDFs or Google Forms. Subscribe to our Teachers Pay Teachers page to get informed of our new digital resources!
- A post on doing roleplays might seem to buck the trend of 2020, but Set Your Roleplay to Music was my fourth-most viewed post. And there’s no reason why you can’t do a roleplay over Zoom or Google Meet, honestly! We’ve all seen concerts and script readings online, so why not have you students do the same? Just make sure you share the script beforehand. I find a Google Docs link is great for that!
- Finally, rounding out the top 5, here’s a post on teaching discourse particles like “like”: What does “I was, like…” mean? I think it’s a mistake to dismiss “like” or “uh” or “well”. They are used in speech for rhetorical purposes and our students need to recognize that, maybe even employ these terms, in order to be effective communicators!
Most Desired Author
Which of our authors had the most popular author page? This year was a close race between two great writers with some amazing resources!
Check out his books below as well as resources on TpT. And you can also find his new site and blog at Taylor Sapp Writing.
His Shakespeare adaptations are really really funny and clever and more are on the way! Check out all his work at Paul Leonard Murray!
Best-Selling Book of 2020
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The Drama Book$3.00 – $20.00 incl tax -
Teacher Self Care Manual$3.20 – $10.00 incl tax
By far, our best seller of 2020 was the Teacher Self-Care Manual (it was quite a year for mental health and awareness of self-care has definitely sky-rocketed). Self-care smarter, not harder!
In close second was The Drama Book, a great resource for teaching language with drama activities, theater games, improv, reader’s theater, and even doing plays. It’s really an evergreen resource and the activities work online or in-person.
How was your year? Share in the comments about something great that you made or did this year!