About FreshPlans

 

“FreshPlans is a project of Haden Interactive. Specifically, it’s the project of Josepha, Rebecca, and Rosamond Haden. Among us, we have more than twenty years’ teaching experience.” That’s how we started this page way back when we first launched this website. 

We have a lot more experience now. 

We were a homeschool family way back in the 20th century, and now there’s a new generation in the family. Both of the brothers in the family (their picture is below) became teachers — one in college and one in middle school. We have always been and continue to be deeply committed to education and to lifelong learning. 

But things have changed since we launched the site. At first, we wanted to provide support for classroom teachers. We had been writing lesson plans for other sites, including the Kennedy Center, and we saw a real need for hands-on engaging lessons for STEM subjects. Here are some of the things teachers said about our lessons:

• “OMG! I love your posts!”-J.L.
• “Wonderful! Very useful! Please keep it coming!” -T.A.
• “OMG this is flippin’ awesome! I love all your lessons!” -D.R.
• “XDD OMG Awesome!! I’m so bookmarking this for later use. You are my hero!” -F.O.
• “Excellent and useful lesson plans. Thank you.” -S.E.
• “I feel your methods and techniques leveraging social media to reach out definitely need to be emulated by more educators, trainers, teachers, and undoubtedly a difference can be made!” -V.M.
• “When I clicked onto your site, I came across a treasure trove! Thanks for sharing all these great resources and for your wonderful ideas!” -H.V.

Now, we find that teachers often don’t have the freedom to use out-of-the-box, hands-on, active lessons. They often can’t use literature in their classrooms or focus on critical thinking and problem solving. 

Parents are responding by turning to homeschooling, virtual schooling, hybrid schooling, and adding at-home learning to their kids’ public schooling. 

So we are changing our focus to help homeschool families. We still love and welcome classroom teachers, but we’ll have more at-home learning information and support. And we’re offering not only fresh lesson plans, but also fresh ideas for planning home/school life. 

We originally ended this page by saying, “We love to hear from you.” That’s still true.