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Enhance Learning

Use the alphabet cards to help students practice the alphabet. The images below the letter help them practice the sounds and the cutout letters are great ways for them to practice writing the letters. They can trace the letter. You can also use the letter cards to spell out the student’s names. Ask them to see how many other words they can create with the letters in their name.

The circle fraction pieces in the math category can help illustrate the use of fractions. Suggest a pizza reference. For example, ask the students if “Big Billy ate half of the pizza for dinner and half of what was left over for lunch, how much pizza was left”. Using the fraction pieces, they can have a manipulative to help them figure out the solution.

Use the cutout puppets, animal and people shapes to help students with storytelling abilities. They can use these to help them tell a story to their classmates. The students can practice using pitch and volume to help animate the story.

Decorate the Halls and Walls

Use the border shapes to help create fun borders for your classroom and hallway bulletin boards. With all the fun shapes, you can have a different border for every class unit, season and holiday! Laminate the cutout borders so you can reuse them year after year.

Have the students write essays in the shaped books so you have a great end product to post in the hallways so parents and staff can see the great work and learning going on in your classrooms.

Create a character education bulletin board and use the great cutout banners etched with character education words. Post the banner and then use cutout stars or circles to write different ideas on how to exemplify that characteristic.

Recognize Achievements

Acknowledge your volunteer’s outstanding efforts with a card. There are some great cards in the Cutout Maker library you can use to write your kind words on. Some even give you a place to add a name to cutout.

On your Character Education bulletin board, cut frames to put around pictures of students who epitomize the character education word of the month.

Write on the trophy cutouts the names of the students of the month and proudly display these in the hallway.

Create coupons using the dollar cutout to give to students as they achieve milestones. Allow them to turn these coupons in for treats.

Need Training on Total Access Shapes CD’s?

You or any of your staff can join our trainer for live online training seminars. Each session is one hour long and focuses on a single VariQuest™ learning tool.

Email Victoria Cobb at victoria.cobb@avispl.com to find out the schedule.

The VariQuest Suite of products is perfect for developing a student based enterprise. This gives students real world work experience and responsibility for running the business. It can even help them fulfill academic, work based learning standards with exposure to marketing, operations, production, finance and sales disciplines. The Poster Maker, Awards Maker and Cutout Maker’s output can easily be sold no only to teachers but to other students and members of the community. Here are some ideas!

Back to School Night: Sell posters, banners and cutouts to teachers and administrators to decorate the hallways and classrooms with curriculum based materials.

Science Fair: Students can order cutouts to help decorate their science fair boards. Teachers can order plaques for the winners of the fair.

Sporting Events: Create posters and banners for pep rally events and advertise the upcoming games. Students can also sell posters depicting a picture of the sporting team with the team’s schedule. Local businesses can purchase stickers to post on water bottles with coupons to their businesses. Cutouts can be sold as ways to get the crowd excited!

School Dances: Sell posters of student photos taken at the dance. Sell cutouts to decorate the dances with. Student committees can purchase posters to advertise the events with.

Community Events: Members of the community can order posters to promote events, nametag stickers, and bumper stickers for events

Class Spirit and Club Events: Grade levels can purchase car decals and bumper stickers with their graduation year. Clubs can sell bumper stickers to members or as fundraisers.

Do you have a fundraiser idea using Varitronics products? Let us know and we can feature your idea on our blog or quarterly newsletter! Email Victoria Cobb at victoria.cobb@avispl.com with your ideas.

Click here for more fundraiser ideas

Fundraising

Create stickers to sell during Valentine’s Day rather than sell carnations. There are several great templates in the Design Center software you could use to sell these unique valentines.

Sell stickers to support different clubs in your school. Whether it is the chess club, drama club or even a sport, you can create small stickers that students can stick to mugs or notebooks. You could also use the bumper sticker templates for a bigger sticker with a larger profit.

For spirit week, sell graduation year stickers and use this as a way to see who has the most spirit – the more stickers sold equals a winner! High Schools students will enjoy the creations you make on the clear sticker because they can stick these onto the windshields of their cars.

If sporting events cause trouble with parking, why not make a few bucks off of it? Sell VIP parking passes that you can create using the Awards Maker. Let these folks park in the spots closest to the stadium.

Get your Marketing classes involved on the fundraising and ask them to contact local businesses. Sell water bottles, notebooks, or pencils with special labels during sporting events or during lunch periods. The sticker may even include a coupon, so student can take the water bottle or sticker to the business for a special discount.

Create Incentives

Highlight student achievements in the Accelerated Reader program by giving them a bookmark for each new level they reach in the program. Simply print one of the ribbon stickers and stick to manila card stock to create a sturdy, useful award to keep them reading!

p>Motivate students to hand in assignments in a timely manner by creating simple, quick stickers that say something like “way to go”. These stickers can be personalized with their name to make them special.

When a student consistently makes improvements in their grades, why wait to give them an award at the awards ceremony? Create a plaque or bumper sticker to show them you see their efforts and are proud of what they’ve accomplished.

Use the Awards Maker to create stickers that show a student their improvements. Maybe you’re working on learning a complicated concept. Give them an award for after mastering each portion of the concept. By the end of the unit, they will have all collected a complete set of these incentives.

Highlight Specific Programs

If you are working on character education year round, pass out stickers to students who embody the concept you are teaching. For example, you notice one of your students is willing to share supplies with another classmate. Showcase that student’s positive behavior with a small sticker with her name and what she embodies.

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Start a “Random Acts of Kindness” program at your school and reward students with a sticker when you see them exhibit kindness to classmates. This small incentive will help them to understand how their behavior has made a positive impact within the school.

If your school has a Head Start program, create bumper stickers to help the program grow. The more exposure the program has in the community, the better your chances are of enrolling additional students.

Create plaques or window stickers for teachers who are working towards or earned their National Certification. This allows parents and visitors to see how many teachers you have that are dedicated to their own growth as educators.

Educate

The bumper sticker templates can help teachers create word walls in their classrooms. All the colored sticker media has a temporary adhesive making them easy to peel off of the wall after use. Because the stickers are not made of paper, they shouldn’t apply to the percentage of wall space covered by paper rule the Fire Department enforces.

You can also create stickers the students can utilize while they are learning new concepts like math formulas or grammar rules. The more they see the rules and concepts, the more likely they are to remember them. If it’s posted on their notebook, they’ll see and use them every day!

Create puzzles by creating stickers with vocabulary words and definitions on separate stickers. Press the stickers to a card stock to make them sturdy and use them like flash cards. Have the students match the words to their definitions for a group project that is fun and educational.

As you can see, there are several great applications that you can utilize your Awards Maker for in addition to the twice yearly Awards ceremony. With the quick print times, you can get in and out of the workroom with great incentives that will wow your students with little effort on your part!

To view Varitronics® full-line of visual learning products, click here.

Encourage teachers to post banners and posters in the hallway, cafeteria, office and other non-classroom areas. While walking with elementary students to the library or cafeteria, stop at the posters and banners to ask them to read aloud. One of the great opportunities for reading everyday is to post the lunch menu. Select a different student each day to read the menu. The media specialist may want to have students contribute to book reviews each week. Again, this project could become an opportunity to read more – reading the reviews might inspire a student to read the whole book!

Create word walls to keep new vocabulary on the walls to help students learn their meanings. Use your Awards Maker bumper sticker templates to create sticky-backed labels to post to your word wall. Or, use the clear parking permit sticker and take advantage of the unused space on your windows. You can encourage your students to stare at the window! Keep the wandering eye engaged by sticking words and phrases from the lessons on the ceiling too – they’ll be learning something no matter where they look!

The Cutout Maker can make learning grammar enjoyable. With the Total Access Shapes CD, you have access to over 3000 shapes in the Cutout Maker library. Get started with a grammar lesson by cutting out some shaped nouns like a picture of a cat or a beach ball. Then use your fonts and the “connect letters” or “add bar” option to help create your verbs, articles, prepositional phrases, etc. Lay the cutouts on a table and ask the students to create sentences using the cutouts. Make it harder by asking them to identify the different parts of the sentences. Show how to rearrange sentences by utilizing commas. That portion of the lesson can help educate your students on comma splices and prepositional phrases. Learning how to remove prepositional phrases from sentences to check the subject and verb agreement is a skill tested on the SAT, so this is a great activity for high schoolers too.

Practicing reading everywhere gets students in the habit of understanding how important the written word is. Make reading a daily activity with your class and utilize your VariQuest products to help inspire your students to become avid readers!

Cutout Maker

The Cutout Maker can really help students by creating manipulatives to use during their lessons. One of the great things about the Cutout Maker is you can pre-laminate your construction paper using a cold laminator so your shapes are cut laminated and ready to go! You could easily attach a small piece of Velcro to the back and utilize a felt board with your shapes.

Common early math skills include learning patterns and counting. Use the Cutout Maker to create a variety of shapes like different flowers or bugs. Set these up in a pattern and ask the students which comes next. With the same set up, you could also ask the students to group matching shapes together and count how many are in each group. Make it more involved and have them also practice identifying colors.

The Cutout Maker can also cut out words and letters. With Total Access Shapes, you could utilize the ABC cards which cut out the upper and lowercase letter with a shape that begins with that letter. Have the students practice tracing the letters to familiarize them with the letters. Ask the students to find the card that starts their name. Build on those skills as their learning progresses and ask them to find other students’ names.

You can build word walls with the addition of images to help them learn words. For example, cutout the word cat and add an image of the cat. With your word wall, you can even ask the students to match the image to the word.

Poster Maker

Create rules posters with images to help your students learn the rules of the classroom. You can also create posters that will be utilized during “read around the room” activities. Put small poems or short stories on a poster and read these with the students. You can also create a timeline poster and ask the students what happened during a story you’ve read together.

Create centers devoted to poster activities. Create a Venn Diagram and give the students sorting activities with cutout shapes. More useful posters in the templates collection are the scenery posters. The students can either draw on the scene or place cutouts in the scene and talk out a story. By engaging in the scenery and using their imagination, the student is also actively creating dialogue and practicing speech.

Create simple board games on a poster and laminate it so you can use the board year round. A standard board can have many applications by just changing out the cards students turn over during the game. For example, create one set of cards with dots on them and the students can advance as many spaces as there are dots on the card. Create a second set of cards with letters on them. If the student is able to identify the letter, they can move forward one space.

Awards Maker

In addition to creating quick awards like plaques for “Outstanding Reader” or small stickers that say “I am Polite”, you can also create bumper stickers to promote and grow a program like Head Start.

The Awards Maker can also help create signs to post in areas of the classroom. For example, create a sign that identifies the “reading nook” or label boxes in your classroom with stickers that say “crayons” or “scissors” with an image of the item in the box. Those labels can be used during the “read around the room” activities too!

Having text in your classroom and even down the hallways helps the students learn that text is a part of everyday life and it can encourage their curiosity in the written word.

Reading and writing are an active part of any subject, but the transition from reading fiction in an English classroom to reading scientific journals and non-fiction can be difficult for some students. Learning how to write lab reports and papers can be tough too! Here are some ways you can utilize the VariQuest Poster Maker, Awards Maker and Cutout Maker to help smooth the transition.

Reading

Try modeling reading a scientific journal article with the class to help them understand how reading in the science classroom is different. Show and explain the purpose of an abstract. Read it together and afterwards, fill out the K (what I know) and W (what I want to know) part of a K-W-L chart poster together as a class. This can help the students set a foundation allowing them check their comprehension before they delve further into the article.

Show the students how to utilize graphs and other tables in the article by enlarging these into a poster. This is an easy task when you take advantage of the scan and print feature on the Poster Maker. You can model how you would stop reading to turn to the visual for additional information. Ask the students to come up to the poster and show the class where what they’ve read is shown on the table, chart or graph. This way, they’ll begin to understand that reading science related news is often more than simply reading text and can take more time.

Finally, use the Cutout Maker or Awards Maker to create large versions of new vocabulary. While reading, stop when you come across a new word. Attach each word to your white board as it is identified in the text. This will help indicate how they would want to write these words down and look them up as they are reading. Give the students dictionaries to look each word up as you run across them and write the definition on your board. You may even want to take a moment to check their comprehension of the definition. Learning the vocabulary immediately, rather than skipping over words they don’t know, is an important skill that will help them throughout their educational career. There is ample opportunity to teach students new words and this skill within science related reading. After the demonstration, you can post the cutout words to a word wall in your classroom and even create lessons out of the uncovered vocabulary.

In addition to vocabulary words, they may encounter unfamiliar symbols. Use the Cutout Maker to decorate a bulletin board to promote their visual vocabulary too! For example, they may not understand the symbols on a weather map, chemical structure diagrams, international symbols of units, etc. You can find many science-related shapes in the Cutout Maker’s library to help create visuals for your classroom!

Writing

Writing expectations differ from those in the student’s English classroom. Familiarize them with the scientific method, APA formatting and your personal expectations by creating posters and cutouts.

One of the helpful posters you can keep up in your classroom year round is a checklist the students can refer to that ensures they cover all aspects of the scientific method in their papers and reports.

Another helpful poster you could utilize is a scientific method of inquiry poster. The students can begin each experiment learning to fill out this poster together. After the experiments are complete, they’ll be able look at their initial thoughts and learn from them. This could even help improve their writing skills if after each experiment; they are required to write a small report.

Another helpful poster for every classroom is a rubric. Create a poster that you post in your classroom all year that displays the expectations and what qualifies a paper as an “A”, “B”, “C” and so on. They’ll know what is expected of them!

Use the Cutout Maker to create inexpensive cards to sell to the students for Valentines Day. You could also create tags if you choose to do candy-grams or carnation sales! There are so many great designs to choose from!

If you wanted to try something a little more outside the box, why not try selling Valentine’s Day stickers with the Awards Maker. The students can add names and short messages to stickers that can be handed out during the day.

If you want to make a little more money with your Valentine’s day activities, sell posters! These are like giant cards that the students can make for one another. They’ll have fun picking the designs and writing a message on them. You could even offer stickers as an extra to help them decorate their posters.

Start by using your Poster Maker to create formulas posters. The students can refer back to these static visuals in the classroom while they’re learning. By allowing them the opportunity to see these formulas over and over, they’ll have a better chance of remembering them! So, when you ask them what the volume of a cylinder is, they’ll eventually be able to rattle it off to you. An easy way to help them out is by starting each lesson with a quick review of the poster you’ve created.

Do you want to have a poster that is up year round with helpful tips? Why not create a poster with the rules for zero. Those rules can be tricky and if you’ve posted it, your students will always know whether or not zero is an even number! For younger students, they may need help distinguishing between greater than or less than. Give them a poster with a great visual to help them remember which is which!

Other great uses for the Poster Maker can be to create interactive posters. Enlarge a grid so you and your students can go back to the poster to plot points, lines and equations. By utilizing a poster, you can keep yesterday’s work up to refer back to so they can see the progression of their learning. In an elementary classroom, create a number line banner or word problem posters that they can work in during group sessions.

If your school has the Cutout Maker, take some time to review the library of shapes. Do a search by keyword, and enter “math”. There are tons of manipulatives for the math classroom. For example, try a quick math game with students by giving each student a set of cutout symbols. Ask them to show you the plus sign, equal sign and so on. Make it harder by asking that student to give you an example of an equation using that symbol, and have a second student give you the answer for bonus points!

You can also find money shapes in the cutout maker’s library. This is another great tool to have on hand for group work. Give the students word problems involving money and have them show you with the cutout money what the answer is. You could also start the lesson with a task like asking them to show you four different ways to give fifty cents for change. The money shapes are a great way to add some hands on learning to your lessons!

For older students, there are even three-dimensional shapes for geometry lessons! Have them put the shapes together and ask them what the shape is called, how many sides it has, what the angles’ degrees are, and so on. Give them rulers to measure the sides to start computing the volume.

Another trouble spot for geometry students is circles. Remembering the area and circumference of a circle may be tough. Why not give them some hands on practice by cutting out some circles for them to measure and solve. Add some string to the mix to help them understand the concept of circumference. They could actually loop the string around the cutout shape, then flatten it out to check their math. And speaking of pi, liven your room up by creating cutouts of pi’s value that spans the perimeter of the room!

Poster Samples

• Geometry Poster »
• Word Problem Poster »
• Value of Zero Poster »