This contest has ended. Click here to view our winners and get ideas on how you could use the VariQuest tools to do creative and helpful projects in your school! Are you a VariQuest customer? Are staff members at your school creating cool things with your VariQuest tools? Show the world your creations, and WIN!

It's no secret that we're all dealing with a lot right now. Between anxiety about health & safety, isolation, and inequity, it has obviously been a rough couple years. And as students return to learning in this back-to-school season, there's no question that we all need to focus some efforts on supporting mental health. We've rounded up some of our best free resources and downloads, to help you re-engage learners with movement, calming activities, breathing exercises, and behavior management techniques, to help your students when "overwhelmed" is an understatement.

If you are looking for an educational poster maker that can effectively serve your classroom needs and help your students enhance their ability to learn, we offer our VariQuest® Perfecta® STP Series Poster Design System. These are the machines you need for full-color, scan-to-print capabilities to promote effective educational learning for students through the production of educational posters.

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.