Today is World Rainforest Day, a global celebration that takes place annually on June 22nd. World Rainforest Day is a reminder of the important role rainforests play in our planet's health and biodiversity. Take the opportunity to inspire your students and foster their love for nature through interactive learning activities that spark their interest and motivation to protect these valuable ecosystems. Let's explore some fun ideas to engage your students and deepen their understanding of rainforests, their importance, and the need for conservation.   

Earth Day is on April 22 and this year’s theme is "Restore Our Earth" which emphasizes natural processes, emerging green technologies, and innovative thinking to help restore the world’s ecosystems. Since its inception in 1970, the intent of Earth Day is to care about the natural world through proactive preservation measures and actions. Clearly there is more work to do but there are fun and easy activities to start with in the classroom. Here are seven of our favorite, and fun, Earth Day activities:

You may have seen media stories of the air being clearer since stay-at-home directives have been implemented in different areas of the world (Los Angeles, India). NASA satellite data actually shows a 30-percent decrease in air pollution over the northeast United States (click on the link to view slider image: Drop in Air Pollution). What does this all mean for our climate? How are your children and/or students reacting to the changes? Do they realize there are changes at all? This may be an opportune time to include climate change into your instructional plan, especially with the focus of Earth Day 2020 being climate action. So how can you do it? Here are 7 ideas to try:

November is here and the holidays are quickly approaching, but there’s still plenty of learning and teaching time before the break! Here are our top tips to help you create engaging lessons all month long.

Be sure to check out the latest content for November on MimioConnect™ , our interactive teaching community, to help you get started on the right track:

Teachers, I know what you’re thinking. You’re just a few weeks into summer and your own kids are already bouncing off the walls. They’ve gone to the pool, slept in, and played with the neighborhood kids, but now you hear your offspring saying the words that we sometimes hear our students say: “I’m bored.” What do you do now? How can you entertain the kids without blowing the budget? Here are some activities you can try this summer that are either free or of a minimal cost:

After a long year of classes, grading, and helping students grow, teachers truly earn their summer break—after all, it’s the perfect time to relax, unwind, and refresh before the start of a new school year. So, just how much do educators love this time off? And how do they spend it?

Here are 50 reasons why teachers love summer break and what they like to do with this much-needed time away from school:

Are you swamped throughout the school year? Do you get resources delivered to you, but just don’t have the time to look at them? How many sites have you bookmarked during the school day, never to go back to?

As our school year winds down, summer is usually the time we can take a break and relax. It is also the perfect time to catch up with some resources we found over the school year and just didn’t have a spare moment to peruse.

Here are some tools and resources to organize these educational finds we have stumbled across:

America has always had a culture set on dreaming up possibilities and then taking action to make them happen. I believe that the amazing innovation we have seen in the United States (and, in some cases, don’t even know about yet) is due to the “maker” mentality. Because the art of making is inherent to the very fabric of our culture, it’s central to 21^st learning.

Childhood has long been a time when young minds are allowed – indeed, encouraged – to play and “make.” It’s important to understand that allowing students to be makers opens the doors to both personalized and authentic learning.

The current Maker Movement in education puts greater emphasis on allowing students to imagine, envision, create, innovate, play, formatively learn, experiment, collaborate, share, and – most of all – dream of possibilities. Creating a classroom makerspace seems to be a natural progression in today’s schools.

The school year is winding down and final grades are being entered. Field day is right around the corner, and students are starting to get more restless than usual. For teachers, this is a hard time of the year. Any teacher worth her salt wants to maximize learning for every minute of every day. At the same time, there is a limit to how much can actually be assessed accurately during these final few days.

To lend a helping hand, over the few weeks we’ll be featuring ideas and planning tips for making the end of the year fun, memorable, and engaging for students. Today let’s discuss problem-based learning (PBL), a student-centered pedagogy in which students learn about a subject through the experience of solving an open-ended problem. Via the PBL format, students absorb both thinking strategies and domain knowledge.

Whether you are teaching summer school or spending the summer at home with your kids, you may be searching for some new learning opportunities and activities. With great summer weather and nature in full bloom, there are lots of exciting things to do that kids just don’t get to experience during the regular school year.

Get out and get learning with these fun summer lessons: