You create, edit, and publish new pages just like you create, edit, and publish new posts. The difference is that these pages do NOT appear on your home page in your stream of posts. The extra pages you are creating are static pages, meaning that they are not updated when you add new posts to your home page. For that reason, they're good for keeping information about the class, or about you, or about some special long-term project the students are working on.
Once you've created a few pages, you need to put a gadget on your home page so students and parents can get to them. Click on "Layout" in the left-hand list menu. Click on any spot that says "Add a Gadget", then click on "Pages" in the box that opens. This will open your options box for the Pages gadget:
Under "Pages to show", check the pages that you want to include in the gadget. (This is also where you can add a link to an external website, like the school or district website, or Aeries.) Under "List Order", drag the pages to the order in which you would like them to be shown.
This box will appear like this no matter where you have added your gadget. However, whether the pages show up horizontally (like tabs) or vertically (like a list of links) depends on where the gadget is added. If you want to have horizontal tabs, move the gadget to be underneath the blog header. If you put the gadget in the sidebar, it will appear as a list of links. You can move the gadget around after you click "Save", in the layout screen.
