Saturday, January 28, 2012

Monday, January 23, 2012

Yenka: Math and Science lessons, demos, interactives

This is a very cool site. Focusing in math, physics, chemistry, programming, and engineering/technology, the site has interactives, demos, and tools as well as lessons on the subjects. There are over 300 physics resources alone!

http://www.yenka.com/

Sumdog Math Facts Practice

Similar to Fun4theBrain.com, this site gives you engaging games to practice math facts. These games, however, can be multiplayer games. Some have very hip, modern themes (like saving endangered animals). Play is free, but they do want you to register.

http://www.sumdog.com/

Virtual Math Manipulatives--"Thinking Blocks"

http://www.thinkingblocks.com/

I really love the approach on this site: First they teach you how to use the manipulatives to work math problems visually, and then they give you a chance to work it out. For example, the ratios section gives you a word problem and a work space so you can translate the word problem into thinking blocks and figure out the answer.

Great site!

Reading Games (printables, mostly)

http://www.printablereadinggames.com/

Online and Offline Creative Activities

http://www.kenttrustweb.org.uk/kentict/content/games/makeandDo.htm

Songs--LOTS of them

Songs, lyrics, audio, video, downloads....TONS of kids (over 2000 songs by their count) music here:
http://bussongs.com/

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Reading Program

There are tons of great interatives here for learning reading, including pre-reading skills.

http://www.literactive.com/Home/roadtoreading.asp

Thursday, January 19, 2012

FREE Complete first-sixth grade grammar, usage, and mechanics courses

Published by Scholastic, these are high-quality workbooks in pdf format.

http://www.scholastic.com/dodea/index2.htm

The "Training Module" are teacher's manuals
The "Black Line Masters" are the workbooks.

Fantastic resource!

Phonics exploration

What sounds do letters and letter combinations make?

http://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/demos/aaPrimary/Literacy/phonemes/Alphabet.html

This is a great writing text

None of the stupid games most writing teachers use in Elementary school (like "Write a report on a country..."). In fact, this downloadable text tells you how to make your writing great despite stupid teachers with bad writing pedagogy. And it's fun to read, with lots of examples.

https://ttms.box.net/shared/static/ldpbe9jvhy.pdf
(That's a download link, just so you aren't surprised when it starts to download).

You can get more great language arts downloads here: http://www.ttms.org/

Flipped Schools High School

This high school tried (successfully) a new technique for educating the students. They have the teachers record the lectures so the students watch them at home. Then they do the classwork in class instead of as homework.

The advantage of this for us is they put the lectures online, freely available to everyone. That means you can have a complete high school course in any of the core subjects free.

http://flippedhighschool.com/

Click on the subjects in the navigation bar. Because it is left to the teachers to record their lectures, the lectures are of varying quality (just like teacher's classes in real life are). But, since this is a functioning system in use by the school right now, there is a good chance the quality will improve over time.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Art Lessons for Kids

http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/

Awesome art projects for kids. You could take all your art curriculum from here. Easily.