Hot websites

Teaching Pre K-8, Aug/Sep 2003 by Lindroth, Linda

Put your best foot forward at the start of the year with these back-to-school resources

School bells are ringing and classrooms across the country are gearing up for another exciting year. I hope these web resources help you start off on the right foot in developing your long-range planning for the content areas.

Homework Center

www.multcolib.org/homework/

This simple, direct database from Multnomah County Library is different from most education portals. It's a rich and practical collection of dozens of common education topics such as animals, American history, biographies, maps, states' information and more.

Each category lists web resources with a short annotation to help teachers find those relevant to their curriculum. And, just a click away at the top of the home page is Tareas Escolares - the entire portal in Spanish!

The online library is accessible from home or school to offer additional research options. The "Library Catalog" can provide a full bibliography for class reports or theme units for long-range planning throughout the school year. There is even an option called "Ask Us! Online" that lets you e-mail research questions. This resource can help with teacher homework as well as student assignments.

Nasa Explores

www.nasaexplores.com/

NASA Explores brings some of the best of NASA to your classroom with two real-world science articles each week. Each printable article is adapted for three reading levels - K-4, 5-8 and 9-12 - and includes "Lesson Links" with 3-5 related lessons and activities. Each lesson contains a full Teacher Guide with Objectives, National Education Standards for the core content areas, materials, background, related links, detailed guidelines for activities and discussion and extensions. The Teacher Sheet and Student Sheet(s) are in PDF format for easy printing.

I really like the clean format and the resources. You'll love the three reading levels and the wonderful way in which science is integrated into the reading curriculum. I am especially impressed with the depth and breadth of the lessons and student activity pages. All the weekly articles are archived, making it easy to find relevant activities to include in long-term planning for the entire school year.

Ready to get started? Just click on "Subscribe" in the menu bar on the left-hand side of the page to sign up for e-mail notification and summaries of each week's topics. What a great way to get science, current events and leveled reading in one integrated package!

Milestone Documents

www.ourdocuments.gov/

This website features 100 "milestone" documents from American history, which were chosen for their significant contribution to our nation's history from 1776 to 1965.

Get middle grade students involved in primary source materials and civics by asking them to choose their top 10 documents from this list of 100. You can really challenge them by asking them to decide on 10 documents that could be deleted from the list to make room for 10 new documents from 1965 to the present - then ask them to nominate 10 new documents. You can click on "Teacher's Toolbox" to download the 80-page "Teacher Sourcebook" made possible by Newsweek.

CyberSleuth Kids

www.cybersleuth-kids.com/

This is a great search tool for students and a great tool to introduce in these early days of the school year as a K-12 homework helper. You can use it to train your students to surf Cyberspace for facts to support topics for this school year.

The opening page is divided into categories that will make it easy for you and your students to surf for the topics that interest you. Searching is easy - just type in a keyword, select a core content area or choose a theme from the "Subject Themes" box. The search results provide a list of resources, complete with annotation and URLS, that can be printed and inserted into your lesson plans or listed in a bibliography for student work. There is even a link to resources that show you the correct way to cite an Internet source - a valuable thing for today's researchers.

Don't miss the well-designed, searchable "Classroom ClipArt" database, which is free for K-12 students. Here you'll find hundreds of great images for your core curriculum needs. This is a super resource for project-based learning.

Last but not least, make sure you click on "Lesson Plan Central" for lessons, webquests, cyberguides and worksheets for many popular curriculum topics. Productivity tools are also available so you can easily generate certificates, timelines, webquests and weekly assignments.

You can register for a free newsletter of updates and monthly topics, and you can even have your students sign up for free e-mail accounts at http://cybersleuth-kids.zzn.com so they can stay in touch with teachers and friends throughout the school year.

Lesson Plans Page

www.lessonplanspage.com/

This is a collection of over 2,000 free lesson plans organized by subject, grade level and topic. You can even add your own lesson plans to share with other teachers.

New teachers will love the site's 10-step guide to lesson plans. And all teachers will want to visit the "Seasonal Lesson Plans by Date." In addition to lessons, you'll also find science projects, math worksheets, feature articles and teacher magazines. Don't forget to add your personal classroom stories to the collection of "Inspirational Teacher Stories."