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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.

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!

Visitors saw how the VariQuest Poster Maker, Cutout Maker, and Awards Maker can be used to create revenue for their schools. The booth was set up as a school store with samples of items the students could sell to students, staff and even the community. Lenn Fraraccio and Alex Millender, a couple of our sales representatives, shared some of the ways these tools can be used.

One big school event is the awards banquet. Schools often have to have a list of students receiving awards weeks in advance to be able to order the awards. With the Awards Maker, the students could be in charge of fulfilling the plaque orders in house which saves both time and money.

High Schools have unique fundraising opportunities, thanks to seniors and sports teams. The Awards Maker can create car window decals for the “Class of 2009” High School and Middle School sports teams can sell posters with a photo of the team and the game schedule. Stickers that say “I support Girls’ Volleyball”, “Go Lancers!”, or a school letter are other ways to highlight school spirit.

Some high schools even have a Sports Marketing team in charge of creating signage to drum up attendance at sporting events. In addition to advertising for the actual game, they also create posters and stickers that serve as advertisements for local businesses who sponsor the school. For example, a local store may pay the sports marketing group to create advertising stickers to place on water bottles.

Schools can hold scrapbooking nights where students, parents and teachers have access to the Cutout Maker’s library of shapes to create scrapbook pages. It’s an easy and fun fundraising event for schools to hold.

Help the new students find their way around the building by posting maps of the campus. Nobody wants to feel lost and rushed for time between classes! Scan and print it a copy on your Poster Maker!
Create bulletin boards that highlight afterschool and extracurricular activities the students can join like Chess Club, Tutoring, Yearbook, and Sports clubs.

A great elementary school opportunity for poster fundraisers is to sell birthday posters. Send the students home with a flyer informing the parents “Happy Birthday” posters are available to purchase for their child. The poster could be posted in the home-room, media center or cafeteria, Post the personalized poster the week of the student’s birthday and give it to them to take home at the end of the week. If you have an Awards Maker, you can quickly make a sticker for the student to wear the day of his or her birthday!

Click here for samples ideas