Putting together lesson plans is no easy task. Putting together lesson plans that students will need to complete at home due to virtual or hybrid learning is even harder. And putting together take-home lesson plans for distance learning to help students with a special need like English Language Learners (ELL) might be the hardest of all. As we navigate our 2020 holiday season where many educators are having to adapt and plan for the upcoming inevitable, you may be trying to gather all the tools you can, to create an arsenal of activities that accomplish your curriculum - but can be done from home. We've partnered with Cathy Henry from Free Word Work and The Curriculum Corner to put together some lesson plans and activities that you can use, especially for distance learning.

Some schools have set up classroom calming corners, places where students can be taken for a brief period of time to relax and decompress from over stimulating activity or frustrating tasks. At VariQuest, we offer the Cutout Maker 1800, a reliable and effective digital die cutting machine that may be used by teachers to help students learn in a visual manner through the production of shapes, letters, numbers, bulletin board items, and manipulatives that are automatically cut. These items and others may be used in calming corners to help students relax and learn at a slower pace for a period of time.

In a year seemingly ruled by "Murphy's Law" - you're looking at supplies for your school that you've never had to before. And when you think about using precious funding dollars on tools you'll need during a time of a global pandemic, you might also wish they'll have longevity in use for the years of (hopefully) normalcy to come. Safe school elements you might be looking at would include capabilities to make posters, floor markers, personal protection and property labels, wipe-clean surfaces, and cleaning supplies - but how do you translate this need for now, with your needs for learning - both distance and in-person? Let's take a look at 3 "now and then" solutions for your school that will be a great fit whether you're navigating a pandemic, or not.

"...in the time of COVID." An addendum to many sentences these days as we all learn to navigate a new normal, this phrase is used for the flexibility, adaptability, and patience we've accepted as our most crucial character traits in recent months. As this has been a scary time for everyone, especially students, you may need to welcome everyone back with some social-emotional learning lessons and activities - to discuss worries and feelings. If your school is planning to welcome back students to the building soon, you might need posters, floor markers, and labels to help keep everyone safe. You might also need some ideas for personalizing students' belongings and creating disinfect-able learning materials. The Curriculum Corner has some of those ideas for you! In this latest video they've created in partnership with VariQuest, Jill and Cathy share their tips for showing strength and readiness through these strange times, to welcome students back to learning, wherever it may be occurring, with the help of the VariQuest Motiva®, Cutout Maker, and Perfecta® utilizing Engage Every Learner™ Content!

You've got a big job to do. And like always, we want to help. You're preparing for a new kind of year. You might be welcoming students back to your school building with brand new safety precautions, continuing distance learning for the foreseeable future, or a hybrid of the two - but your teachers, students, and staff will need new resources to adapt to the changing times. And so, we pledged to give you new content - for education on virus prevention, directional crowd control, and social-emotional wellbeing - on TOP of tons of new pieces for traditional and virtual instruction! We've delivered. Exclusively for the VariQuest 8.0 Software, this content update is packed with over 2,500 NEW and revised templates, cutouts, graphics, fonts, and collections - bringing our grand total to over 22,000 content options for our nation's best educators to create with. And it's FREE for our customers!

At VariQuest, we serve the needs of teachers and students in the pursuit of effective learning through the supply of easy-to-use visual teaching aids. After taking a look at the various academic tools we offer to help you enhance your classroom experience, you may find a number of solutions to help teachers teach better and students learn with greater success. The various types of teaching aids teachers and students can benefit from to achieve excellent results include presentation templates, visual posters, and more. The digital die cutting machine we offer can help achieve these goals.

At VariQuest, we offer many tools and resources to help you enhance the learning environment in your classroom. Our interactive learning tools for teachers and students are highly effective for helping children flourish in the classroom and increase in their knowledge and comprehension of different subjects. With the latest trends in classroom technology, teachers are turning more to interactive methods of teaching, and using the various tools that make this way of relating information, data, concepts, and ideas possible. Educators have numerous opportunities to present information in a fun and engaging way through interactive learning.

We're coming up to the month of March, where [we hope] spring is springing and the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) celebrates Music in our Schools Month. Jennie Nichols, music teacher to 650 K-5 elementary students at Covington-Harper Elementary School in Virginia, has a busy March every year, as they celebrate the month's distinction. In 2019, Ms. Nichols was putting on six grade-level concerts in just one week, and she thought, wouldn't it be great to recognize all the students' hard work and document the days with a fun photo booth?

We're approaching the end of the calendar year, and that means gearing up for a holiday break, then full speed ahead in January!

As educators, we sometimes refer to this time before the holidays as the "Mid-Year Slump." Your students may be getting a bit restless with less outdoor time due to the changing seasons, and we are all looking forward to the upcoming vacation days - to give our brains a little "break" from the structure of the school week. Building movement into your students’ day is important for so many reasons, but in the months of November and December it becomes a necessity. We suggest building several small "brain breaks" into your day. With 21st Century Skills in mind, Jill and Cathy from The Curriculum Corner share their tips for powering through this "slump"-like time, to get your kids moving and motivated to power through a restless time of year. With the help of the VariQuest Motiva®, Cutout Maker, and Perfecta® utilizing Engage Every Learner™ Content, they'll give you some great ideas to carry out in your classroom!