Over the years, I’ve shared several ideas for Christmas gifts for students, including all that I’ve done up until 2020. If you would like to check out some of those, visit these posts:
As 2022 quickly closes, I wanted to squeeze one final blog post in! This one, in particular, because it is the last of four things I wanted to share with all my teacher friends from our 28-day journey through Europe in the fall of 2022.
This past fall, my husband and I had the privilege of traveling to Europe for the first time. Countries visited included Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (London), and France.
The entire trip went quite smoothly. The only transportation hiccup we encountered was traveling via train from the Netherlands to London. One of our trains out of the Netherlands was delayed, causing a missed connection from Brussels to London. Luckily, they could get us on a train later that evening, but it meant we had an eight-hour overlay in Brussels, Belgium.
What at first seemed to be an inconvenience turned into a wonderful opportunity as we could spend an entire day exploring the city! A delay of two or three hours would have kept us waiting at the train station.
In this blog post, Daniel shares a variety of creating transitions between songs in different keys for a seamless musical experience in Christmas service music. Beautiful!
I have never made this turkey recipe so I can’t vouch for it, but I’ve been a Smitten Kitchen fan for years. Also, this past year we made a few recipes that used Gochujang sauce (a fermented chili paste) and we really liked it. I don’t think it will make the turkey spicy or “Asian-food” flavored, it will just give it a nice deep “Umami” flavor.
While working on one of my speaking sessions, newly available this year, I discovered a highly useful tool on Canva.
It’s a Color Wheel. You can input one color, and it will give you a variety of other colors that can be used in combination with that color. This would be super useful if you had a studio or brand logo with a color and you wanted to add more colors to it.
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Canva is part of my daily work flow. While working on slides however, I wasn’t sure at first how I could use their slide templates but then easily change the color scheme without changing each item one by one. I knew there had to be a solution. As always, I just had to Google it! The place to do it is at the bottom of the page and I didn’t even see it until I read about it.
My husband and I recently took our first-ever European trip (and first-ever month-long vacation!). After week one, we realized we should start documenting our observations – little things we especially felt were fun, interesting, and good to know and remember for the future.
Throughout the trip, we continued to add to the list. I thought it would be fun to share it here as both a way of passing on our knowledge and experiences and also simply for the sake of documenting it for ourselves for the future.
To make it easier to digest, I organized our random list into the following categories: food and water, language, bathrooms, money, gear, mannerisms and miscellaneous, and transportation.
A few disclaimers:
This has nothing to do with piano teaching (hope that’s OK 🙂 )
It is in no way exhaustive.
As the title states, this list is completely random and consists only of our thoughts and opinions.
While we know it’s important not to overgeneralize, sometimes there are just things that “stuck out.” We realize it doesn’t mean an entire population/culture is that way, it’s just little things that we noticed or found interesting from the moment in time /location we experienced.
Our opinions were formed by the places visited including Germany, Netherlands, London, and France.
If you have had the same experiences and observations or found this post useful for your travels, I would love to hear about it in the comments!
Welcome back! After a bit of a break from Friday Finds following #250 (which you should check out because it includes fun finds from other teachers), I’m excited to get this series going again!
While I strive for it to be a weekly series, I’ve learned that it’s better for life not to put those restrictions on myself, so if you want to make sure you get the latest delivered to your inbox, signup for my email list here. (Be sure and check the box that says “please send new posts to my inbox.”)
Here we are! 250 Friday Finds posts since March 2016. I’ve been soooo excited to post this one for a while now.
The twist is that this list is a culmination of items you sent to me that you either discovered and loved from this weekly series or were items you would include if you were to publish your own list! I hope you enjoy this special celebration week.
I also wanted to give you a heads up that this will be the last Friday Finds for a couple of months as I will be out of the country with my husband for a month-long trip to Europe to celebrate our 20th Anniversary. I’ll be back with the series in early November and look forward to the next 250!
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Submitted By Rebekkah Maxner
The Friday Find I wanted to mention that touched my heart was about a mom who had cancer, but she and her husband chose not to tell their kids about her prognosis. They maintained a home atmosphere that spared their kids from worrying or making choices based on their mom’s illness.
I felt that was so selfless and likely contributed to her prolonged quality of life. What a gift to have given her kids — years of living in sunshine instead of under a cloud. She gave them a childhood defined by innocence.
Don’t forget – I need your help! Next week will be #250 of this series. My goal is for it to be a culmination of the best items YOU’VE discovered from this series.
You can drop me an email or comment directly on this blog post. (It would also help me greatly if you could include any links.)
Thank you so much for taking a moment to share back with me and other teachers who enjoy this series!
