Educators know that having strong behavior management skills can be as important, or even more important, as the ability to teach content. We want to help children modify detrimental behaviors, but we also don’t want any of our actions to result in a child feeling shamed or demeaned. This can be a challenge! Because we've all had a challenging past few months, and feelings of embarrassment won’t help children improve their behavior, we've partnered with Cathy Henry of The Curriculum Corner and Free Word Work to put together some ideas to help you work on actions and reactions with your students on a more personal level. These are ideas to help students learn and grow and meet goals, making them proud of their positive results!

The technology of die cutting machines has advanced over the years. These machines are particularly useful in schools for teachers and students for various educational applications. Schools can use them to produce many items that are highly effective at helping educate students. At VariQuest, we offer a high-quality digital die cutting machine – the Cutout Maker 1800 – for teachers to use in enhancing student learning in a visual manner through the production of numbers, letters, shapes, items for bulletin boards, and manipulatives.

Kinesthetic learners learn best while processing information when they are physically engaged or active in some way. The standard classroom setting is not necessarily well-suited for these learners. They tend to learn better when involved in active participation in some form. At VariQuest, we offer a wide-ranging selection of tools and resources to help you innovate and transform your classroom experience, including providing visual/kinesthetic learning tools for kinesthetic learners and those teaching these students.

An emotion meter is a great way to gauge what mood your students are feeling in the moment! Whether it's for posting in the classroom, calming corners, or student journals, this tool can be created large or small for group or individual discussions. With social-emotional learning for students a topic of the utmost importance as children grow and mature, use these simple exercises to give students meaningful tools for managing and working through their feelings!

As students today are spending more time sitting with technology than ever before, educators continue to innovate with creative ways to get them up and moving, while learning as they go. And after a year centered around terms like isolation, quarantine, and shelter-at-home, finding new ways to engage students and welcome them back to school buildings for learning can be a challenge. But we've got a fun way to get the wiggles out. And as you may have guessed, it's another free sensory path for schools! (Download our forest adventure sensory path here!)

Visual aids are effective tools teachers can use in the classroom to enhance student interest, comprehension, and retention of information and concepts. At VariQuest, we offer tools to help students and teachers achieve greater results in the classroom, such as machines that create vibrant visual aid posters.

With traditional education instruction rooted in desk-sitting and blackboard-writing, teachers today are constantly innovating to reach students where they are, and how they learn best. In a classroom full of visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners, educators have found creative ways to help students learn through viewing, hearing, and doing. Enter - the sensory path for schools.

Hopefully you've heard it constantly this year, but it deserves to be said again: You're doing great. You're doing your best, your students are doing their best, and their parents are doing their best. The end of the year brings up these sentiments more than any other time of year, as you prepare to break for summer and send these students to their new classrooms next school year. And all the hard work your students have done - deserves a little reward and recognition. And what kid (or kid at heart) doesn't love a little treat!? You can make it as hearty (cereal) or sweet (candy) as you please, but you can make it easy using the VariQuest® Motiva® 400 Specialty Printer and Engage Every Learner® Content to create labels for your treats to show your students their work has not gone unnoticed!

Engagement. Inclusivity. Social-Emotional Support. With all that students have experienced in recent months, you're looking ahead to the future. In a "normal" year, your federal funding dollars may have gone towards field trips, student performances, or hands-on lab materials. Now you have decisions to make on how to spend that funding in a meaningful way to set up for what next year will bring. Overcoming challenges from distance learning, promoting inclusion and equality, and expanding your social-emotional support efforts are just a few concepts that will require extra action as students (hopefully) return to classrooms. Today we'll explore a few major funding streams and how you can use aligned tools to face these challenges, head-on.

While celebrating the earth is given a special day each year in April, students are fascinated with learning about the ground and the elements and the weather all year long. Recycling, limiting energy usage, and cleaning up litter are all important concepts to instill in our future generations, but what's equally important is their understanding of how the environment functions as its own thriving system - whether humans are here to enjoy it, or not. With rock cycles, life cycles, tide patterns, and more to explore, today we're going to talk about the water cycle, and tips for teaching it with a full class, in small groups, or as a take-home project for students.