The Mystery of the Missing Freebies

Imagine this scenario. You're sitting down to plan your lessons for the week, and you remember a freebie you saw in my TpT store that would fit perfectly with your plans. You click over to my store and do a quick search. It's not there. Hmm. You try a different search term. Still no freebie. Then you notice that most of my freebies are gone from my store! Yikes! What happened to all of Laura's freebies???

Fortunately, this mystery is easy to solve. If you've been following me for a few years, you can guess where my freebies are... right back on Teaching Resources which is where most of them were located originally. You'll be happy to learn that everything is still free, too! The big question is how to find those freebies now.

If you want to know the backstory behind the change, keep reading. If you just want to know the fastest way to get to all those freebies, skip this section and jump to the tips for finding them!

The Backstory...
What happened was that last week I took a serious look at my TpT store and realized that it was a hot mess! The product covers did not have a consistent look, and some of them were downright difficult to read in thumbnail form. So I tackled the project of updating my cover images, organizing the categories in the sidebar, and cleaning up my store. Sort of like a spring cleaning about 3 months early! I'm not finished, but here's a peek at how the first few pages of my TpT store look and the rest will be updated soon.

After working for several hours, I realized that I had a TpT freebie problem. Would you believe I had over 80 freebies in my store?! Frankly, there were so many freebies there that it was becoming overwhelming to manage them all. Most of those freebies were still on my Teaching Resources site, too, although many of the ones on my site had not been updated in a long time. The problem was that every time I updated a freebie, I had to update it on my website and in my TpT store, which meant creating all new thumbnail images for TpT and updating the descriptions. Honestly, I just wasn't able to keep up with it all.

To simplify things, I decided to deactivate most of the freebies in my TpT store and host them in one place - on Teaching Resources. The next time I revise a freebie, I'll only have to update the file on my website, and all of the links and images throughout the site will automatically update.

Tips for Finding My Freebies 

So where can you find all the freebies that used to be in my store? Many of them are in my online File Cabinet or on the Teaching Strategies pages. You can also use the green search tool at the top of Teaching Resources, right under the navigation bar to try to find what you need.

But wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to search all over Teaching Resources for them, and the best freebies were listed on one page?

Great minds think alike! I had the same thought, so I created a special page that has a long, clickable list with DOZENS of my freebies that used to be on TpT.

To access this page of my very best freebies, subscribe to Candler's Classroom Connections, and then follow the links in the Welcome email.

If you're already on my mailing list, check your inbox and find the message I sent on December 27th with links to the new Subscriber Resources page and the page titled Laura's Best Freebies.

If you can't find it, sign up for the newsletter again. If you use the same email address you used before, you'll be asked to update your profile. After you fill out the form and click Update Profile, check your inbox for an email with links to the free resources for subscribers. If you don't receive that email, you'll need to sign up with a different email address.

Looks like the case of the missing freebies has been solved, so I'm officially closing the books on this one!