We teachers can be pretty set in our ways when it comes to how we do things in our classroom. Lessons we’ve had in our arsenal are continually refined and can be presented at a moment's notice to fit our curricular needs. For those newer to the classroom, it takes considerable time to create the perfect lesson that achieves the learning goals you have. We’ve all been there when a lesson turns out to not go exactly the way it was intended—it’s all part of the process of getting better as an educator and a professional.

Ready to try something new? Shake up your routine this month with these engaging lessons and activities from MimioConnect™, our interactive teaching community:

1. February Calendar and Activities: Our Valentine-themed calendar and morning meeting lesson pack will fill your students’ hearts and minds during the month of February. Use this daily calendar to engage your students with meeting, graphing, and math activities, and track attendance with the included chart.
   
   
2. Valentine's Day Gallery Pack: Share the love this month with our Valentine’s Pack, featuring themed activities, templates, and clipart. With this lesson pack, students can practice multiplication facts, solve word problems, and even put hearts in alphabetical order.
   
   
3. Presidents Pack: Celebrate Presidents Day with this fun pack, which gives you the option to use one of the prepared lessons, build from one of the templates, or use the gallery of images and labels to create your own. The presidential possibilities are endless!
   
   
4. Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln: Ideal for students in grades 1–4, this lesson honors President Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday fell on February 12. Engage your students with interactive pages that feature true/false, cause/effect, and a fun flash review.
   
   
5. Black History Month: Celebrate Black History Month with this inspirational pack, which includes mini-lessons on Barack Obama, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth, and Thurgood Marshall.

If you enjoyed the above content, consider joining MimioConnect to access more of our valuable lesson content and resources. Click here to register today!

Transform Your Lessons

In the heart of every educator, there’s an innate desire to make a difference in students’ lives and help them prepare for the future. There are many ways to reach the diverse range of students in your classroom—even the most experienced teacher can pull some new strategies together to have a very profound effect. MimioStudio™ classroom software has the built-in capacity to make this very easy. Imagine taking a very ordinary lesson, which could be a worksheet or a PowerPoint presentation. With a few clicks and a little know-how, your go-to lesson can be revived in a just a few minutes for a totally different outcome. Ordinary lessons can become extraordinary with additional instructional components such as video clips, multimedia objects, and images that can bring everything together for today's learner.

You can continue to extend the power of your lesson using many of the built-in features found in MimioStudio. Tools such as Screen Clipping, along with the various object manipulation options, allow you to enrich any lesson you already have or build a new lesson from the ground up. While there a few techniques to learn for using these formatting tools, the outcomes they provide are worth the time—and these tools will soon become a natural extension of building or refining that perfect lesson. The proof is in the results, as many teachers have discovered!

Learn more about these instructional strategies during the following Quick Learn sessions in February:

• “MimioStudio: Adding Content” on February 7 at 7:00pm ET and February 21 at 8:00pm ET
• “MimioStudio: Formatting 1” on February 8 at 7:00pm ET and February 22 at 8:00pm ET

As educators, we are very busy, stretched in each and every way with so many expectations placed upon us. We simply need more time to do the things we have to get done! Those teachers who have taken the plunge to use some of these interactive tools and strategies are some of the biggest advocates for what is possible because they have seen the results in student performance. I challenge you to step up your game—get out of that comfort zone we all fall into that allows you just to "wing" the lesson you are teaching. Instead, bring it to life with easy-to-implement interactive elements and watch as your students become more engaged with the lesson content.

Interested in checking out more of the Quick Learn sessions offered this month? Click here to view our complete list!