Illuminations

If you’re looking for some effective and engaging online math activities, be sure to check out the Illuminations website, from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (http://illuminations.nctm.org/ ).

The website has 102 interactive activities for students in grades Kindergarten through 12 and you can search them by grade or keyword.  It also has a whopping  579 lesson plans to help teach geometry, algebra, numbers & operations, measurement and data analysis & probability.  One very helpful tool that I found on this site was the Dynamic Paper tool. From the website: “Need a pentagonal pyramid that’s six inches tall? Or a number line that goes from ‑18 to 32 by 5′s? Or a set of pattern blocks where all shapes have one-inch sides? You can create all those things and more with the Dynamic Paper tool. Place the images you want, then export it as a PDF activity sheet for your students or as a JPEG image for use in other applications or on the web.”

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is a public voice of mathematics education, providing vision, leadership, and professional development to support teachers in ensuring mathematics learning of the highest quality for all students. With 100,000 members and 250 affiliates, NCTM is the world’s largest organization dedicated to improving math education in preK‑12.

Illuminations is designed to:

• Provide Standards-based resources that improve the teaching and learning of mathematics for all students.
• Provide materials that illuminate the vision for school mathematics set forth in Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, Curriculum Focal Points for Prekindergarten through Grade 8 Mathematics, and Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making.

Illuminations is part of the prestigious Verizon Thinkfinity program.

BrainPop

Welcome back to a new school year!  My first recommendation of the year is BrainPop (http://www.brainpop.com/).  Here’s a quick blurb I took from the site to explain what it’s about:

“Founded in 1999, BrainPOP creates animated, curriculum-based content that engages students, supports educators, and bolsters achievement. Our award-winning online educational resources include BrainPOP Jr. (K-3), BrainPOP, BrainPOP Español, and BrainPOP ESL. All are supported by BrainPOP Educators, our teacher community now more than 100,000 members strong and featuring free lesson plans, video tutorials, professional development tools, graphic organizers, best practices, and much more. ”

One of my favourite features of the site is that you’re able to click on the ‘BrainPop Educators’ icon and use it to search for activities that meet learning outcomes in specific subjects in a given grade level.  I tried it out by looking for Grade K-12 Math learning outcomes for British Columbia and was blown away with the results it gave me!

BrainPop does charge a fee for accessing its activities, but you can check it out for 5 days with a free trial.  See how you like it!

Writing Fun

Do you need a hand with organizing your writing?  Writing Fun (http://www.writingfun.com/) provides examples and printable text organizers for a variety of types of text, including:
- Information Report
- Procedure
- Recount
- Explanation
- Persuasion
- Discussion
- Narrative
- Response
- Description

This is an excellent interactive resource!!

EasyBib

Do you need a hand organizing your sources into a properly formatted bibliography?  Look no further – EasyBib (http://www.easybib.com/) will take care of the formatting for you!  The FREE version of the website will automatically search and cite books, websites and over 50 other sources for you, in MLA style.  If you upgrade to the Premium edition you can also format in APA and Chicago style.  Bibliographies just became a whole lot easier to create!

Writing Ideas

Writer’s block?  If you’re stuck for ideas about what to write, check out this link at the Busy Teacher’s Cafe – http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/printables/writing.html .  You’ll find printable calendar pages here with a different writing prompt for each day!  Why not write a story about giving a dog a bath?  Or write out instructions for how to set the table?

The website also contains a number of worksheets geared towards helping you with the various parts of writing (pre-writing, drafting, editing, revising and publishing).  Happy writing!

Star Chart

Check out this link from the National Research Centre of Canada -

 http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/education/astronomy/constellations/index.html. 

Expore a map of the night sky to find 25 different constellations, print out a Planisphere and learn about the constellations visable in the Canadian sky.

Family Education

I recently stumbled across the Family Education website and discovered their ‘School’ sections.  For ages 7-11, go to http://school.familyeducation.com/educational-issues/parents-and-school/34360.html?detoured=1 and for 12-18 year olds, visit http://school.familyeducation.com/educational-issues/34387.html?detoured=1 . Both links lead to printable activities, skill builders, quizzes and more.

EdHeads

Check out http://edheads.org/ for a variety of high-quality educational activities that will ‘activate your mind’!  Try your hand at brain surgery, investigate simple machines or design a cellphone.  Happy learning!

WatchKnow

Check out http://www.watchknow.org/ for thousands of educational video clips! 

Taken from the website:

The Internet is full of useful information, but it’s disorganized and often unreliable. Despite its problems, the potential of the Internet for education is especially huge. Imagine tapping into that potential.

Imagine collecting all the best free educational videos made for children, and making them findable and watchable on one website. Then imagine creating many, many more such videos.

Just think: millions of great short videos, and other watchable media, explaining every topic taught in schools, in every major language on Earth.

Finally, imagine them all deeply and usefully categorized according to subject, education level, and placed in the order in which topics are typically taught.

WatchKnow—as in, “You watch, you know”—has started building this resource.

WatchKnow is both a resource for users and also a non-profit, online community that encourages everyone to collect, create, and share free, innovative, educational videos.

WatchKnow is now officially launched, after being developed for over a year. Whether you’re a student, a parent, a teacher, or just someone who cares about the education of children, you can now use our service and get involved to make it even better. Please sign up! (But did you know that you can add new videos to our system without signing up? They’ll have to be approved first.)

There is no better online cause than the future of our children. And just imagine how fantastic it would be if there were a resource online we could go to, or send our kids to, that would explain every topic they study in school instantly and reliably. Many of the resources needed for such a site already exist online; they just need to be organized.

Happy viewing!

TVO

My most recent find is TVO (http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/tvoparents/index.cfm?page_id=622).  From the website:  TVO is Ontario’s public educational media organization and a trusted source of interactive educational content that informs, inspires, and stimulates curiosity and thought.

Click on above link to do a search of the TVOKids website for fun interactive – and educational! – activities.  You can search by age or subject area or you can just head over to the main page (http://www.tvokids.com/) and explore.