Back to school is back in full force! It’s both overwhelming and exciting to start a new school year as you meet new students and plan out the year ahead. That’s why we’ve pulled lots of inspiration and ideas for new lesson plans to help you start the year on the right foot!

Go pinning!

Pinterest is a great resource for educators with good reason: it makes virtual collaboration easy by showing what other teachers are doing in their classrooms. If you’re looking for creative lesson ideas for the new school year, we’ve got Pinterest boards full of activities for math, language arts, science, and social studies. From array cities to story tacos to lemon batteries to compass roses, there’s something for every class.

Scope out online lesson plans

There are tons of lesson plans available online that you can customize to fit your own students. Do your students love TED talks? There are a whole slew of lessons created around the talks on TED Ed, like this one on real-life sunken cities! If you’re an IXL user, find new ways to incorporate the program into your lessons with Common Sense Education, which provides user-submitted lessons on topics like proportions and lines and angles.

Use your community

Online communities are a great source for new ideas and education trends. Twitter chats (like #edchat) enable you to jump into live conversations while sites like Share My Lesson provide free, curated lesson plans categorized by grade and subject.

IXL users: have you been to the IXL Community yet? It’s a resource that’s there just for you! IXL makes it easy to know you’re covering your standards with free alignments to the Common Core and alignments to popular textbook series like enVisionMath and GO Math. On the IXL Community, you can also find upcoming webinars that will help you implement IXL effectively in your classroom.