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!)

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.

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.

Distance learning has been hard on students (and teachers!) - not just from the lack of human interaction, but the stress of figuring out new technologies, the eye strain of staring at screens, and the absence of hands-on, collaborative learning activities they thrive on in a classroom setting. With distractions abound and parents often struggling to assist, take-home, printed activities may be a strategy worth employing to encourage a kinesthetic approach to a learning environment we've all had to adapt to.

Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, has been celebrated for thousands of years. It is one of the most important holidays widely celebrated in many Asian countries and territories including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Thailand. Usually falling between January 21st and February 20th, this year's start of the Chinese New Year will occur on Friday, February 12th, and is the Year of the Ox. The celebration lasts for about 15 days. Gung Hay Fat Choy is a common Chinese New Year’s greeting in Chinese Cantonese, which means “wishing you great happiness and prosperity.” On Chinese New Year, the themes of happiness, wealth, longevity, luck and good fortune are celebrated. Some of the traditional celebrations include family gatherings, visiting friends and relatives (baai nin), exchanging “lucky money” contained in red envelopes (lai see), decorating homes with paper decorations and scrolls, lion dances, and fireworks. Chinese New Year is a special holiday to celebrate with your class while teaching them others’ cultures and comparing them to American traditions. We have put together a collection of fun, hands-on and Common Core-aligned lessons and activities, classroom decorations, and craft projects for you to explore and enjoy with your class, and I want to share them with you!

At the close of a year, we talk a lot about new year's resolutions - and how we want to better ourselves in the "fresh start" of a new orbit around the sun. But after the 2020 we had, it feels more important to look ahead to the possibilities of the future and frame "betterment" in a new light - in the form of hopes, dreams, and visions for what could be.

There's no doubt about it, most of us are spending more time at home these days. And when we spend lots of time at home, we tend to have more time to think. This year, there has been a lot to think about. We wouldn't be able to teach history in our classroom if no one had documented it, and because no two experiences are alike, it is a valuable exercise to encourage our students to document their own experiences at 2020's end.

We're moving towards holiday break, and we don't need to tell you that it has been one crazy year. Whether your students are heading home for their break early in distance learning, or they're only apart from the classroom for the holiday, send them off with a "Flat Stanley"-like cutout of their favorite teacher (that's you!) and a fun assignment to document your (their) experiences while you're in two different places! With social-emotional support at the top of every educator's mind during a trying year, what better way to remind your students you're always with them, than a small cutout take-along of yourself!

It's well known among educators that in the learning pyramid, students learn a small percentage of what they see, hear, and do - but they learn the most from teaching others. In this activity to practice math skills, students in grades 1-8 will put together their own game - helping them learn during its creation, and when the game is carried out, they're teaching others how to follow by the rules they designed!

Introducing a new learning concept with students may feel like a daunting task - with the uncertainty of the coming weeks top-of-mind. In the year that keeps us on our toes, we can still rely on those teaching strategies that are tried-and-true for classroom instruction, but quickly adapt them for distance learning when we have the right tools. The Y-Chart is one of them. The concept of a Y-Chart is likely not new to you, but thinking of ideas on how to make this group discussion concept work in a hybrid or distance learning environment, might be. We've again partnered with Cathy Henry from Free Word Work and The Curriculum Corner to put together some tips and activities that you can use, especially for distance learning.