Tips, Tools and Technology for Educators

Incredibox – Up-and-Coming Music Creation Site

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Incredibox is an up and coming website where children can create their own music! This fun and educational site created by a French design company and a French musical group, allows children to build their own songs including effects, beats, melodies, chorus, and voices.

Easy to Use & Compose

Each of the color coded musical options can be dragged onto the main screen and then a character appears and will begin to sing in the selected option. The characters take on the personality of their beat including hats, glasses, and different shirts. Once the characters have been added to the screen, you can mute, include a solo, or delete their addition to the song. This will require the child to be interactive with the site and muting, adding solos, or deleting the various musical sounds. This can be something that was created on the spur like improvisation or something that was already rehearsed. Once happy with the song, you can record your composition for sharing.

Additional Options

Another option available on the site is to shuffle your song. This moves the characters and the sounds around to create a completely different song based on the same sound choices. There are also shortcuts to the mute, solo, and delete options. To mute you can single click the character, to add a long you hold the left mouse button down, and to delete an action you can double click on the character.

Another interactive element of the website is that there are awards that can be earned. These include bonus songs made by the creators of the website for using different aspects of the site like creating a song you enjoy and trying out all of the different effects.

Educational Use

This website is great for children who are interested in music. They can easily compose their own songs, record them, and share them with friends via email or social networking sites. An upgrade that is soon to be released will allow users to save their songs as embed code to add into their own websites. Children of various ages could use this site from elementary to college aged. I think boys would be particularly interested in this website as the musical characters are men.

This site can be used for children to learn about beats, musical composition, and express their creativity.

Additional Free Online Music Creation Sites

Jam Studio (a bit more complex, but teachers more about keys, chords, and tempo)
Aviary Music Studio (easy to use, many more instrument options)
Creating Music – Musical Sketch Pad (great for younger children)

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Adobe Creative Suite (CS) 6 Release

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

On Sunday May 6^th, Adobe released the much anticipated programs, Adobe CS6. This package of software includes the most popular graphic design programs used in the industry including Photoshop (photos), Illustrator (graphic design), InDesign (books, brochures, and newsletters), Flash (animation), and Dreamweaver (web design). While the original focus of the package was professional, these programs are now what is used in many schools and what students like to use to create top-notch projects. These are great programs for teens to learn if they are interested in photography, web design, graphic design, interior decoration, and other creative fields.

There is an educational version of the suite that is provided at a reduced price to make it more affordable for students. However, even with the reduced price, the product is fairly expensive for the novice user.

Adobe has heard the complaints of the cost and has come up with a solution called “Subscriptions” that was released on May 11th. This would allow users to pay a monthly subscription price ($29.99 for students) for the programs along with having cloud storage to save the large graphic files. This can be a great advantage for teens wanting to learn the program over the summer or as part of a class without having the large upfront investment of having access to the program at home.

Updates to the Program

One of the updates to the CS Suite is that they have updated the user interface of all of the programs. They are trying to make the tools more integrated between the various programs. They also took feedback from current users to come up with over 65 new or modified tools to make using the program easier to increase productivity. The program also loads much quicker and saves large files almost instantly.

InDesign has been updated to allow for the creation of publications that are friendly for tablet devices. New features include the ability to zoom, add slide shows, audio, and video. It has also been updated to allow for the creation of eBooks.

Flash now has been updated to be able to be used on the iOS devices through an additional add on feature in the program.

Muse is a new program that was added to the suite. This program allows users to create HTML websites without having any knowledge of programming code. It allows the novice design to create a professional looking website with minimal experience.

How to Help Your Child Learn CS6

There are many ways that your child can learn and explore the use of the Adobe CS6. Many individuals like to just play around with the tools and see what they can do. Other children may be more interested in learning the program through the use of a hands-on textbook that they can use at their own pace. A good book to learn Photoshop would be The Adobe Photoshop CS6 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby. I really enjoy the Adobe books written by Scott Kelby because they are in full color, provide real life examples for how to use the programs, and have very detailed directions and explanations of how to use the program.

Another way they can learn the different tools of the program is to watch videos online. There are many websites that show the functions and how to use them in everyday graphic design.

Once they learn the basics of the program you can also encourage your child by giving them creative ideas of design items they could create like create a logo for a brand of cereal that they made up, or create a movie poster. You could also encourage them to edit family photos from an event or vacation, create the family reunion newsletter, develop flyers for the garage sale, or use the programs to develop some very fun projects of special interest

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Parent-Friendly Websites to Help Improve Child Learning at Home

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

The Internet is a wealth of resources for parents to find information about how they can help their child learn at home. As a teacher, this is a very frequent question asked by parents who see their child struggling in school or who want their children to continue learning and advancing at home. I have an arsenal of resources that I provide to parents so they can help their children. Here is a list of a few of the more popular online resources.

Internet 4 Classrooms – Parent Page

One popular website for parents to help their children at home with learning is Internet 4 Classrooms. This popular website has many child-focused online games and activities. They have a specific parent page on their site including links to these activities as well as other links for topics including homework help, internet safety, reading help, family planning for the future, time management, character education, how to get involved at your child’s school, and reviews of great educational apps.

Scholastic – Parents

Scholastic also has a parent friendly site for information. Topics include books and reading, child development, school help, activities, and kid friendly websites. Articles, activities, and videos are provided for various age levels to help their children. This site is very informative and user friendly and updated frequently.

ED.gov – Parents Site

The government education website, Ed.gov, also has a parent website geared to help children with learning. This site is written in both English and Spanish and includes online booklets about preparing your child for school, after school care, helping your child read, helping your child be academically successful, assisting special needs children, and planning for college. Each subpage of the site includes either online booklets, articles, or research to help parents gain the information they need to help their children be successful in school.

The Child’s Academic Success page was especially informative including booklets on how to help your child at home with learning at home and is broken down by subject area. It also includes a segment on helping children with homework. I see this as an important skill so that parents can help their children, but not actually complete the assignments for their children.

Education.com

The entire website education.com is geared toward parents. This site is very well designed and easy to use for a parent to plan activities and gain educational insight to support their children. It is engaging, includes videos, interactive postings, articles, and activities to do with your children.

To access the worksheets section of the site, you do need to create an account, but the worksheets are free. For the workbooks, there is a small monthly fee to access complete sets of materials. The remainder of the site can be accessed without an account, but it does include advertising including advertising videos.

Being active in your child’s education is very important. It can help them to be successful lifelong learners. These sites will help you to learn more about being active in your child’s education.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Learning Language Arts Skills through YouTube

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

My students introduced me to a comedian named Victor Borge last week. He was a comedian and pianist that was very popular in the 40’s and 50’s. Part of his comedy act about punctuation has been added to YouTube. His skit starts off with a funny explanation about how we use punctuation in writing to separate or emphasize ideas and how we do not always clearly use the same intonations while we are speaking. He then creates silly sounds like popping noises while reading a story to verbalize the punctuation. As the students were explaining the skit to me, they were so excited and engaged in expressing punctuation. I thought that this was a great video to start a discussion on the importance and uses of the various punctuation marks.

It also led me to think that other engaging education videos on YouTube that could be viewed at home to encourage children to learn language and reading skills. I went on to YouTube and then started searching key terms of popular language arts skills that are taught in school and found a wealth of educational videos that could be used for learning and reviewing material.

Pronouns

One of the keywords that I typed into the YouTube search was “pronouns.” One of the first links I came across was a School House Rock video that teachers children about pronouns through silly animations and rhymes. The next link was a video with Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Duffy Duck. In this cartoon Bugs and Daffy have an argument based on the confusion about the pronouns him, me, and he. These videos could be used for review of the topic or as a starting point for learning more about pronouns.

Another video includes a teacher explaining singular and plural pronouns. The teacher goes on to explain the differences of a pronoun as a subject, object, possessive adjective, and possessive pronoun. This video is great for high school students wanting to learn advanced uses of pronouns.

Literary Elements

Literary elements are also a topic that is discussed in reading classes. The elements include plot, character, conflict, theme, and setting. There are great videos online to learn about the different literary elements. One video I found is called flocabulary. They teach children all of the elements in a rap song with visual representations and examples that kids will relate to easily. There are also other “flocabulary” videos on other language arts topics.

Figurative Language/Literary Devices

Examples of simile, metaphors, personification, alliteration, and hyperbole are used in a video about literary elements found in songs. This video is great for middle school aged children as it used popular songs that the children will relate to while learning about the literary elements. The video is set up like a question and answer activity where the students have to answer the questions after they heard the song.

When actually searching figurative language, there was a great series of videos created by figurative-language.com. This video uses a flow chart method to help a child learn about how to use and recognize figurative language.

YouTube is a great learning resource for children to use at home for an extension of what they are learning in school, practice on subjects they may be having difficulty with, or just for fun!

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Cool Websites for Kids

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

After working with a group of 6^th graders for a day preparing them on taking their upcoming standardized test on the computer, I decided to see what educational websites they enjoyed “playing” on at home in their free time. Some of the popular sites that I’ve used in my classroom came up like FunBrain and Poptropica, but I also learned and played on a few sites that I haven’t explored before and that would be great additions for home learning.

Edheads

One website that the students showed me was Edheads. This website has free science and math games and activities. This site partners with various companies and universities to help develop their games so that they are accurate and educational. Activities include learning about stem cell transplants, design a cell phone, simple machines, perform a hip replacement, and crash scene investigation.

The cell phone activity includes a video on background information, researching, design, and implementation of a cell phone that would be user friendly for the elderly. In the research segment, you learn about the customers need and wants for a cell phone, then you design the phone, and then test it with the market and see how your sales are for that phone.

The activities are interactive, provide great background information, and require children to use critical thinking skills.

Friv

Another website that they really enjoyed playing on is Friv. Friv is a compilation website that has hundreds of online games for children. Some of the games have an educational value and some of the games are just for fun.

The game Cannon Experiment has children aim a canon to shoot a ball into a basket. The challenge is that the angle of the cannon must be taken into consideration along with walls and other obstacles in order to make the basket. This game will build a child’s problem solving and spatial skills. The game Plummer 2 is a puzzle game. Children have to rotate the pipes in order for the water to not spill, and make it to the end of the pipe. Liquid Measure has children practice math and measuring skills by combing vats of liquid in the appropriate sequence based on their number totals. With all of these games, the higher the level the more challenging it becomes.

Cookie

One student also shared a website that their little brother uses called Cookie. Cookie is a great website for pre-school and lower elementary aged children. The games and activities encourage children to learn their colors, letters, numbers, counting, addition, subtraction, and shapes. There are also lessons to learn about science topics like animals, transportation, growing plants, and the five senses. These activities are very kid friendly with bright colors, building background knowledge, and using vocabulary that is age appropriate. Young children will definitely benefit from these fun educational games.

Online learn games are a great way for children to learn educational skills that can be applied into the classroom.

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Kid Friendly Photo Apps

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

I have noticed recently that my middle school students really enjoy taking photographs on their mobile phones and on the iPad’s that they use in school. Sometimes they are silly photos or just photos of their friends, but others are very creative pictures. Parents could harness this interest in photography at home to get their tweens and teens learning at home while using their digital cameras and a few cool apps.

Here are several excellent apps and activity ideas to spur your kids to develop their photography and educational skills at home.

Instagram

Instragram is a very popular, free photo filter and photo sharing app. It allows users to take photos on their mobile and tablet devices (both Apple and Android platforms), and add cool filters. Then the users can seamlessly upload them to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

On the Instragram blog, they have weekly challenges for Twitter users. This weekend the “hashtag project” was to get out on the town and take pictures of buildings, moments, and other historically significant landmarks. The winner of the challenge is posted on their blog on Monday. This is a great way to get kids at home interested in photography, Instragram, social networking, and history.

Skitch

Skitch is another popular free app for photo editing, annotation, and sharing available for the iPad, Mac, and Android platforms. This app differs from Instragram in the ability to annotate the photographs. This includes being able to add arrows, shapes, text, crop, and record your movements on top of the photos and then being able to share them. This would be great to annotate photos that were taken for a school project. This app can also be used as a drawing pad or to add annotations to a screenshot, website, or map. It is a very versatile app that could be used in many learning applications.

Camera+

Camera+ is a 99 cent app for the iPhone/iPod Touch to improve the quality of the camera. Features include better exposure, focus, zoom, lighting, and saturation. All of these options help to improve the photo quality and clarity. Additional fun features include adding effects, choosing scene modes, cropping photos, and adding borders. Children could use this app at home to help improve the photos that they take on the iPhone or iPod touch. Activities could include taking photos on a nature hike through a local park and then attempting to classify the animals and plants that you encountered, or taking photos of everyday objects and discussing their geometric shape.

Other Photo Apps to Check Out

Pic Stitch & Pic Frame – allows you to combine multiple photos to build collages
Color Effects – allows you to remove and add color to specific objects and portions of a photo
CamWow Retro – allows you to make current photos look like older photos through filters

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Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

This Thursday is national Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. (Due to State mandated testing, this day may have been affected and changed for your local area. For example, Miami-Dade County in Florida, has moved this event to May 3^rd.) This opportunity allows school-aged children the opportunity to see what their parents do at work every day. Many companies are evening hosting events including informative sessions about the company, lunches, and hands -on -sessions with children. It is a great time to get your children involved in learning about career choices and experiencing the workplace.

Planning to build prior knowledge before they visit, planning for what your child will do at your workplace and following up with questions and activities at home makes for a more meaningful experience.

Building Prior Knowledge

It is always important when a child is learning about something new to try to make connections with ideas and concepts that they already know. Depending on your job and the age of the child, building background knowledge can vary. A great resource would be to review my previous post on career website resources for children.

Planning Your Child’s Visit

It is very important to plan the day for your child while they will be at your workplace. You should setup a schedule including a tour of the facility, meeting individuals you work closely with and explain their positions at the company, and plan a hands on activity to get them involved in what you do. The Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Foundation has great examples of sample days for various styles of workplaces and ideas to get the entire company involved.

Another website that is a good resource for ideas to help your plan their visit is Chiff.com – Take Your Child to Work Day Ideas. This site has ideas for ice breakers and ideas for individuals who work in the science, art, and finical fields. There are also additional resources and links to other websites to help you plan the day as well.

Follow-up

After your child has spent a day at work with you, it is important to follow-up with your child at home. You can ask questions over the dinner table such as what was their favorite and least favorite part of their experience or which of the careers that they learned about at your workplace was the most interesting to them and why. Asking these probing questions helps you to then provide opportunities, books, and learning experiences for them to learn even more.

Many teachers at school may even want their students to follow up and share what they learned while they were at your job for the day. You may want to encourage your child to key a log of their visit, write a formal reflection, describe the skills that they saw being used in your workplace that they are learning in school, or conduct an interview of one of the individuals you work with to be shared later.

This is a great learning opportunity for children and should be planned carefullyto provide activities before, during, and after their experience.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Earth Day & Arbor Day Activities

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Earth Day is celebrated on April 22^ndand Arbor Day is celebrated on April 27^th. These days represent a day that your family can honor our earth and trees. There are many ways that you can get your children involved in learning about the importance of caring for our environment and planting trees.

Apples 4 the Teacher – Online Articles for Earth Day

Apples for the Teacher has online articles that are geared for children that cover topics for at home learning about Earth Day. The articles include learning how to compost, to create an energy-efficient home, eco-friendly cleaning products, and recycling at home. These articles can be a springboard for activities you can do at home during Earth Day.

Earthday.org

Another excellent website for going green on Earth Day is earthday.org. This site has information on various ways to take action including the “Billion Acts of Green” program where individuals post their act of how they will be green this year. This includes conserving water, recycling, reducing, transportation, energy and being green at school. You can read other user’s posts on how they are going green and the impact they are making on their community. These ideas could then be discussed and possibly implemented in your home.

Another cool tool available on this website is calculating your footprint on the planet. You choose your country and then create an avatar. Your avatar then helps to build what your footprint looks like by using your answers to various questions about the types of food you eat, the products you buy, recycling habits, type of house you live in, electricity habits, driving frequency, and traveling. Once your virtual world is complete, you are provided with an ecological footprint. This helps you to understand how your choices impact the world. They then provide various ways that you can reduce your impact on the earth. This would be a great online tool to do together as a family for Earth Day.

ArborDayNow.org

ArborDayNow.org is a good online resource for children and families to learn about Arbor Day and how they can impact their community by planting trees, gardens, and . Their site also has a volunteer page so that you can search up your local area and see volunteer opportunities that include planting trees, or working at wildlife and nature centers. This would provide a great place to look up opportunities for your family.

The site also has many other useful resources like an online tree guide, learn the anatomy of a tree, and a toolkit for families including activities involving nature for all ages of children.

A Walk in the Woods

A Walk in the Woods is a virtual photo montage of a walk through the woods of Illinois. This picture story is great for families to watch together. It encourages curiosity by looking closely at the woods around them. Each of the different seasons will provide a different “look” of the forest. It is definitely a cool website to check out for Arbor Day!

Have fun celebrating our world this Earth and Arbor Day by exploring great online resources.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Poetry and Women’s History Month

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

March was Women’s History Month and April represents Poetry Month. There are many resources available online that children can utilize at home to celebrate and learn more about both of these topics.

Poets.org

Poets.org provides 30 ways that children can celebrate Poetry month. There different ideas include reading and writing poetry, visiting poetry landmarks, attend a poetry reading, and listen to poetry. One of the ideas also includes integrating technology with poetry by creating a tag at the end of your email signature that includes a line of poetry. Each idea includes a link to more information about the idea and stanza’s of poetry. These ideas would be great for older children to get involved in their community with sharing poetry during Poetry month.

Scholastic – Poetry Month

Scholastic has a wide variety of resources for poetry month. Video links include poets reading their poetry and encouraging children to write and publish their own poetry, poetry workshops on how to write poetry, and poets discuss the inspiration behind their poems. Activities include creating a poetry slide show, writing poetry riddles, writing haiku’s, acrostic poems, and analyzing other poet’s writing. All of the activities include specific directions to help a parent guide their child through the activity as well as giving grade ranges for the activities.

Fact Monster – Women’s History Month

Fact Monster is always a great resource for information specifically written for children. For Women’s History Month they provide the history of important women including influential women, leaders, and award winners. There is a full section of biographies of important women covering various fields and achievements. The Fun Features for Kids section includes fun facts about women including women who have been featured on stamps, female children who have made inventions, and daughters who followed in their mother’s footsteps to become famous. After reading the various facts on the website, you can then challenge you child to one or more of the twelve quizzes on women’s history found on the website.

Time for Kids – Women’s History Month

Time for Kids is a website devoted to teaching children about current events, history, and other social studies skills. There is a page devoted to Women’s history month by providing various articles and online activities. This includes a Q & A session with Kristi Yamaguchi, a video about Amelia Earhart, an article and video about women serving in Iraq, an interview with Astronaut Sally Ride, and an article about why we celebrate Women’s history Month. I think this would be a great resource to encourage boys to learn about women in history as some of the successful women held careers that are high interest subjects for boys.

Months that honor specific subjects and ideas give a time at home for children to learn and expand their knowledge about a variety of subjects. Building upon what they learn at school is an important home learning experience.

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Technology Teaching Kids to Tell Time

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Learning how to read a clock is a very important skill that all children must learn. I know that some may find it surprising that even tweens and teens still do not know how to read an analog clock. Learning to tell time is a skill that is covered in the early years of elementary school, however many students to not master this skill. It is important that parents get involved in the process of helping children learn how to tell time on both an analog and a digital clock. There are many different technology tools that can be utilized to help your child learn how to tell time.

Time Monsters

Time Monsters is an online animated site for children to learn time. The main character, Professor Tempo leads children through the skills of learning to tell time broken down starting with learning the hour numbers on the clock and ending with reading the minute hands. Each skill has its own animated story lead by Professor Tempo provides an overview of the skill and then a hands-on activity. Without even saving, each time you go back to the site it will start your child where they left off. Quizzes and printables are also provided on this site.

Apples for the Teacher – Learning Time

Apples for the Teacher has an online interactive quiz to help children to practice telling time by comparing a digital clock to an analog clock. This is a good activity for older children who are struggling with telling time. Another game that they offer, clock practice, has children drag the hour and minute hands to match the time that is represented in the question. Both of these sites can be used for practice, after the skills have already been taught.

Live in Nanny Blog – 10 Fun Ways to Teach Kids to Tell Time

The blog, Live in Nanny, has informative articles based on education and raising a child. A recent post includes many great ideas to help children to learn how to tell time. Her ideas include songs, games, books, toys, videos, crafts, and online reinforcement. Each topic contains a link to an example. The YouTube video, “Hip Hop Around the Clock”, was really catchy teaching children to learn time through song, technology, and visual representation.

Flik-Flak Telling Time Watches

Flik-Flak is a brand of analog wrist watches specifically designed for young children to learn how to tell time. The hour, minute, and second hands are very prominent and different colors on the watch face. This helps the children to be able to determine which hand is used to tell the hour, minute, and second. On their website, Professor Flik, guides children through learning how to read their watch with the characters Flak (the hour hand) and Flik (the minute hand). The site also has an online game for children to practice their time telling skills with Flik and Flak. The child has to be able to read the analog clock and then enter its digital value. Providing your child with their own wrist watch is a great way to have them practice at home.

Teaching children to learn how to tell time is both a school and a home activity. There are many ways a parent can get involved in teaching children to tell time through the use of technology and online resources.

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Intriguing Apps for Learning

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Using mobile technology like tablets, e-readers, and cell phones to extend education outside the classroom is a great way to get children learning on the go. There are so many apps to choose from that sometimes it makes the task of looking for good apps for children a bit daunting. Here are a few intriguing apps, educational, interactive, apps that will engage your children in active learning.

Smash Your Food

Smash Your Food is a nutrition education app. It is one of the most engaging ways that I have seen to get kids actively learning about nutrition and how what they eat affects their body. The user watches a video of different types of foods being smashed to then see what the contents of the food is in sugar, salt, and oil. It is interactive in nature by allowing the child to guess the contents first, then they get to smash the food, and then the results are creatively displayed. Additional resources about nutrition and healthy eating are provided for both children and parents. Super cool, super gross, and guaranteed to have your children remember about good nutrition.

Toca House

Toca House, created by Toca Boca, is an engaging app that teaches younger children about completing chores around the house. Through an interactive game mode, there are intriguing characters that have to clean the house complete chores like ironing, doing dishes, mowing the lawn, or sweeping. The game style and amazing artwork and graphics make this a highly engaging app for children. In turn, the goal would be for children to then learn how to complete the chore in real life with the assistance of a parent.

Circadia

Circadia is a music, colors, and puzzle app wrapped up into one. Users follow the on screen instructions for the puzzle and tap the dots to release bursts of color on the screen. The size of the dot effects the pitch and release speed of the burst, the smaller the dot, the higher the pitcher and the faster the burst. The further you progress in the game, the trickier the puzzles get. This app is highly engaging and additive. Children can take away the musical concepts of pitch and speed while engaging their problem solving skills. Here is a video of an example of the game play.

Multiplication: Invasion of the Moon Monkeys

Memorizing multiplication facts is a very important math skill to learn that impacts other more difficult math skills. Invasion of the Moon Monkeys makes practicing these skills fun for children. This arcade style game pits children against the moon monkeys to save the world by solving their times tables. A competition mode is also available so parents can play with their children or siblings can play against each other to earn the highest points.

Finding different types of apps that appeal to children that involve high-interest subjects and gaining knowledge is a great way to keep kids learning on the go.

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Keeping Safe Outside This Spring

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

In most states, spring has sprung early this year! This means that children will be outdoors playing and exploring. Nature walks are a great way to explore the flora, fauna, birds, and insects are all around you. However, it is important to educate your child of possible unfamiliar threats of nature, like snakes, bees, thorns, poison ivy, and other similar items. This is a great opportunity to teach your child about what they may encounter outdoors this spring. Technology is a great tool to utilize with children to explore these various concerns.

Kids Health (Bees, Poison Ivy, Camping Safety)

The Kids Health website has a wealth of information, written specifically for children, about outdoor safety. Links include how to spot poison ivy, what to do if you get a bee sting, what happens if you accidently swallow a bug, and camping safety. Since it is specifically written for children incorporating audio and highlighted words as the child reads through the page, it is a great resource to review with your child. The site also contains many pictures. This is an excellent resource so children know what poison ivy looks like or the difference between a bee and a wasp.

This website also has an entire section devoted to sun safety. It is also important to think about protecting children from the sun with sunscreen, sunglasses, hats, and appropriate clothing. This site allows children to learn about UVA and UVB rays, sunburn, skin cancer, and how to protect themselves from the sun when they are outdoors.

Learning about Snakes

One resource for children to learn more about snakes is kids biology. This website has a database of animals. You choose the type of animal, and then you can learn more about the different varieties. The information, written for children, includes facts like size, class, eating habits, and where they live. It also has a picture, so the child would know what it looks like.

Another website for children to learn specifically about snake safety is from an article on National Geographic Kids. The article is about a couple who run a snake removal company. The article includes facts about where snakes like to hide, their importance to our eco system, and what you should do if confronted with a snake.

General Outdoor Safety Tips

There are many outdoor safety tips that go even beyond nature that should be taken into account when children play outside. An Epinions article on keeping your child safe when playing outdoors is a great parent online resource. This article covers safety at the playground, dehydration, heat stroke, swimming, bike riding, insect repellents, ticks and other nature’s creatures, and general safety tips.

Educating your child on the dangers of nature should not be a negative experience to frighten your child from heading outdoors this spring, however they should have the knowledge to be confident explorers and feel safe playing outside. This information can help them to stay safe and to know what to do in case of an emergency.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Easter Activities at Home

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Most children will be celebrating Easter with a long weekend away from school. However, this doesn’t mean that the learning has to stop. There are many activities on and offline that you can do at home that combine Easter, learning, and fun. Even if you are a family who does not celebrate Easter, children enjoy learning about other cultural and religious beliefs.

Online Easter Puzzles

The Kidz Page has many online Easter puzzles and activities for children. These games, geared for elementary aged children, include puzzles, Sudoku, mahjong, word searches, matching, crosswords, and other logic-based games. These would be a great challenge on Easter morning to play with each other online while learning Easter vocabulary and problem solving skills. There site also has Easter printables including paper word searches, color pages, and even clip art.

High-tech Egg Coloring

A traditional Easter activity for families is dying hard boiled eggs, which has now become a high-tech creative project. Paas, the major Easter egg dying company, has so many new ways to enjoy this fun activity. New technology has allowed for many different types of egg dying activities including faster dying and kits, wrap kits, tattoo kits, 3d colors, painting, stickers, neon colors, sand art, beads, sparkles, and tie die. To learn more about dying Easter eggs and egg activities for home fun, Paas also has a Facebook page where users can upload their photos of their eggs, and an iPad app which allows you to die and share virtual Easter eggs.

Learning about Easter Traditions

Besides Easter baskets, the Easter bunny, and dying Easter eggs, it is also important for children to learn about the reasons why we celebrate Easter and how those fun traditions evolved over time and across cultures. There are several online resources that are written and designed specifically for children to learn about the death and resurrection of Jesus, why the day of Easter changes every year, and its connection with spring. Also children can explore the various ways that different countries celebrate Easter around the world.

Peeps in Places

While searching for educational sites to for children to explore and learn more about Easter, I came a across a silly site sponsored by The National Geographic called “Peeps in Places”. Viewers were encouraged to take photos of the popular Easter treat, Peeps, in various geographical locations. Some users have even dressed up the Peeps to coordinate with their location. These silly photos, with captions of the locations, can be a springing off point for children to learn more about the various different locations. What a great way to learn about geography!

This Easter weekend incorporate fun activities for learning with your children.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Handwriting Skills

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Handwriting is a very important skill to learn starting in pre-school and taught throughout elementary school. However, with the push for standardized testing and merit pay based on performance, handwriting has been dropped in importance in the elementary curriculum. Technology has also had an impact on handwriting. Some individuals feel that it does not have as much importance as it did in the past because most materials are typed and printed.

Having neat handwriting provides a teacher with a legible document to read. This could possibly lead to higher scores, especially on spelling tests, because the teacher will be able to easily read and correct the assignments. Students are also typically more proud of their work if it is completed so other children and the teacher and read their work.

On the website Parent Guide News, they provide a list of tips for parents on how they can help their children learn handwriting skills at home. Modeling, correcting the way a child grips the pencil, developing fine motor skills, and practicing the alphabet are among the suggestions.

Online Handwriting Activities

While I did say that technology does impede the thought of need for handwriting skills, it can also be an asset in teaching your child handwriting skills. There are many websites and apps that offer learning opportunities for your child to practice these skills.

Spelling City allows children to create spelling lists based on their spelling words at school. These lists can then be used for a variety of activities including being able to turn it into a handwriting worksheet.

Chateau Meddybemps, a learning game website, provides animations of how the letters should be drawn (both lowercase and capitals). Then, there is a practice pad, where children can practice forming the letters on the virtual pad of paper. Their written work can then be printed. The website is very cute and interactive and uses “Spinner the Writing Spider” to help guide the children to practice handwriting skills. This website also has other writing and typing activities perfect for children.

Another website, directed for parents, is Mrs. Meacham’s classroom website. On her site, she has a compilation of tips for parents to help their children learn good handwriting skills. Some of the activities involved technology, others include printables, and the most creative ones involve singing and art supplies.

Handwriting Apps

Apps may be an even better resource for helping your child practice handwriting skills. Tablets provide an on-the-go way for children to practice at almost any location. There is also a wide variety of apps aimed a different grade levels of children. On the Smart Apps for Kids website, they provide an annotated list of the most popular handwriting apps for children with reviews. This will make it easier for you to choose which app is best for your child. One suggestion based on the reviews from this website is to buy a stylus for your child to use to interact with the apps so that the transition to a pencil will be less cumbersome.

Handwriting skills are very important for children to master at a young age. It is important that parents facilitate this learning as it is not always emphasized in the school setting.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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The iPad HD (iPad 3) – Release & Educational Value

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

The iPad HD was announced on March 7^th and released on March 16^th. Over several million iPad 3’s have already been sold, making this the best launch of an iPad yet. This version of the iPad boasts a new HD screen that is capable of 1080p resolution, a higher resolution camera, and a faster processor. There have also been numerous software updates to take advantage of the new features.

This iPad is priced the same as its predecessor, which makes it a great value. The iPad is a great family resource for both fun and educational purposes. Children can use the iPad to not only play games and watch movies, but as a productivity tool to write papers, create presentations, record and edit a video, among many other things.

New Retina Display

The advantage of the new HD display is that it is much sharper than previous versions and eliminated all pixilation. This provides a far superior viewing experience when reading books, surfing the web, playing games, looking at photos, or watching video. This new technology is not found on any other tablet computing devices.

Higher Resolution Camera

The iSight camera is a 5-megapixel camera with high end optics that takes HD quality photos and video. There is a light sensor that now helps in taking higher quality high and low light photos. The autofocus is great for children, which allows the camera to quickly balance, set the exposure, and utilize the face detection. The video camera now takes full 1080p HD resolution video, and also has a higher resolution camera that will be great for children to use for school projects. They can take photos and videos and then edit them in iPhoto and iMovie to build classroom projects.

4G Capability

The iPad 3 also is upgraded with the availability of 4G internet access. This increase in speed allows users to download, upload, browse, and access multimedia online faster. It can also act as a wireless hot spot for other mobile devices. When on the go and not around a Wi-Fi access point, this will make the iPad more useful on the go. This will be great for children to continue learning, even on the road.

Software Updates

With the release of the new iPad, there were also updates to old software and new releases of software. New app availability includes Dictation, a voice to text program and iPhoto, a photo editing program. Updates were released for iOS, Garage Band, iMovie, and the entire iWorks suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), and expanding the types of files that can be backed up on iCloud. These updates allow for the increased versatility of the iPad as a powerful mobile computing device. Children can use these apps to develop creative projects for both personal and school use.

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World Water Monitoring Challenge

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

The World Water Monitoring period opened on March 22^ndand runs through December. This time period is dedicated to creating awareness about protecting water resources around the world. Part of this effort includes educating citizens by having them test their local water ways to see if it is a healthy body of water for swimming, fishing, and drinking. Many different groups including children at school, at home, or through their extracurricular activities may participate in monitoring their local water ways.

EPA Activities

The Environmental Protection Agency provides online activities for children to learn about how they have an impact on protecting their local water resources. This includes a children’s storybook about water pollution, quality, monitoring, and pollution, a word search and message decoding to learn water, a parent guided activity for children to explore local watersheds, websites with more information, and other fun activities.

World Water Monitoring Challenge

The World Water Monitoring Challenge is a great resource for children and families to learn more about protecting their water resources. This is the main site for world water monitoring and where you can buy water testing kits to test you local water ways with your child. These inexpensive kits include materials to test pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and temperature. It also includes an instruction booklet to help children and parents to test the water. It also provides information about the results of the tests.

The data then can be uploaded to their website, which is then compiled into a yearly report. This is a great activity for children to be involved with as they will be part of helping to keep the water ways clean and be able to actually see their impact on the data reports.

Additional links are also provided on this website for both parents and children to explore more about volunteering, watersheds, climate change, and environmental science.

National Geographic: watersheds & water pollution

National Geographic provides excellent online computer-based activities to learn about water sources and water pollution. At home, children can learn sources of water and water pollution based in their local watershed. The web links are provided for the online research that can be done as a family. There are also extension activities that encourage children to learn what to do with residential and commercial water pollution. These activities would be great for middle school students to learn about water protection in their local community.

Being an active part of the community and participating in the World Water Monitoring Challenge is a great way to get children involved in learning about their environment and protecting water ways for future children to fish, swim, play, and drink.

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Learning & Basketball Fever

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Every March, I typically write about how easy it is to capitalize on basketball fever with March Madness and incorporating fun learning activities at home. This year it is double the fun because of “Linsanity” in the NBA along with March Madness. “Linsanity” is the term coined for the rookie New York Nicks point guard, Jeremy Lin, a young underrated Asian-American basketball player who has had a breakout season in the NBA leading the Nicks to a winning streak. Many children, especially boys, are interested in following the games to see who wins the college series, along with seeing a superstar, not much older than them, breaking records in the NBA.

Basketball is a great sport to tie in so many activities including math, language arts, and physical activities. Math activities at home could include learning about probability, averages, and statistics. Language arts activities could include having your child research online their favorite NBA and NCAA teams, or write a poem including imagery and emotions of the sport. You could even have your child actually play basketball games to learn sportsmanship, following rules, and getting in important exercise.

Here are more online resources to help you make the connection to basketball and learning at home.

Education World

Education World has a variety of lessons and links to online lessons that can be adapted for home use about March Madness. Ideas include creating a predicting the winner game, poems, researching the team mascot and college, along with additional resources like the NCAA schedule, how to calculate percentages of free-throws, and connecting basketball to art and physics.

Math Basketball

Math Basketball has fun online games on the topic of basketball. The games include addition, subtraction, decimals, fractions, equations, slope intercept, and coordinate plane. These games are perfect for elementary and middle school aged children.

Leaping From The Box – Capitalizing on Your Child’s Interests

This article is a great resource for parents to find creative ways to incorporate learning activities at home based on their child’s interest. The parent who wrote this article has a son who is very interested in basketball. She was able to make many subject areas fit into his passion of basketball. Activities she included at home were keeping a map of the teams, reading online about the teams, tracking the statics, playing basketball, and learning about teamwork.

Noun Basketball

Noun Basketball is an online game created by Harcourt. This game is for children to learn about the difference between nouns, proper nouns, and words that are not nouns. Each time the child gets the correct answer they score a basket. They then see their scores rise as they answer the words correctly.

Basketball is a great topic to combine learning and fun at home.

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Career Exploration Web Sites

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Children, even at a very young age, are very interested in learning about careers. Toddlers will play and imagine having careers like doctor, veterinarian, builder (contractor), cook, and teacher. Exposing them to a wide variety of career choices allows them to learn about their likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, and what they want to learn more about in life. As children grow, these interests should be explored at home. There are many websites geared toward children discovering possible future careers.

What Career is Right for Me?

One great website for children to begin exploring careers is an online survey called What Career is Right for Me. This career aptitude test allows children to rate their skills in various attributes, interests, styles, values, salary, education, and growth. After taking the survey, the results are then displayed providing a list of selected potential careers. This list includes annotated links to information about each career. Information includes a description of the career, the annual median wage, popular colleges for the career, growth, job tasks, and job skills. This is a perfect website for middle and high school students to explore career choices and learn more about potential future careers.

United States Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a very detailed online resource for exploring careers and finding the occupational outlook. This interactive site provides a general overview of different careers based on a subset of interests. Once selected on a category, the child can select from several possible careers to learn more about. Each career lists information about what the job is like, skills they will need, how to prepare for the job, how much the job pays on average, job growth (or decline), the future of the career, other related careers, and links to find out even more about the specific career. After using the What Career is Right for Me? site, this is a great resource to find out more about careers that would interest your child.

The occupational outlook handbook provides information to young adults to help in their job and career planning. The information includes training and education, earnings, job prospects, job description, and working conditions. Children should look to this resource to see if a specific job market is growing or shrinking and what their possible outcome of obtaining a job in a particular field. In 2011, the general outlook includes information about lack of job openings; however that growth is expected in both the healthcare and technology fields. While this handbook is more technical, it is definitely a good resource for a parent to review with their child to help make an informed decision on a career and possible college path.

Kids.gov – K-5 & 6-8 Career Resources

Kids.gov has a wide variety of resources for children and learning. One aspect of this site is specific pages for children in grades k-5 and children in grades 6-8 to explorer careers. The careers on either site are listed by the type of job. Selecting on the job will bring the child to various government related resources including the National Park Service, Smithsonian National Zoo, Food and Drug Administration, and NASA. These sites are more interactive and engaging including videos from actual people who work in the field. This would be a great starter site for younger children to explore different careers.

These websites will provide an opportunity to get children searching online and exploring possible future careers. It is never too early to begin planning for your child’s future.

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St. Patrick’s Day Activities for Kids

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

St. Patrick’s Day this year falls on a Saturday. This is a prime opportunity for children to learn about the history of St. Patrick’s Day along with celebrating the traditions. Parades, parties, and family-friendly festivals should be abundant this year. This holiday was originally a religious holiday in honor of Saint Patrick celebrated in Ireland. Today St. Patrick’s Day is not only celebrated in Ireland, but around the world. The traditions vary from country to country and even through the various cities in the United States. Traditions in the United States include wearing green, shamrocks, leprechauns, and the rainbow with the pot of gold, and eating corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes.

There are many crafts, home learning activities, and online games to help make this a memorable and learning filled St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick’s Day Printables

One resource online that you can print out activities for your child to do at home is The Teachers Guide. These activities include printouts about math and language arts topics with a St. Patrick’s Day theme. These printable activities include counting, abbreviations, common and proper nouns, synonyms and antonyms, addition, and subtraction. These would be great activities for elementary students to practice skills they have learned in school

Learning Activities for St. Patrick’s Day

On Teach Net there are many different activities that you could do at home to celebrate and include learning. There are directions for art activities, recipes to make at home, science, social studies, and books to read with your child. I thought the activity of creating a shamrock from terry cloth and alfalfa seeds was creative and would be a great activity for younger children. I also thought the social studies activity of discussing Ireland and why it is referred to as the “Emerald Isle” was intriguing. This activity would be great for middle school aged children and could utilize the Internet to learn more.

Fun Online Games

Many children’s websites have fun games for child to play that are St. Patrick’s Day themed. These games include matching, vocabulary word searches, and puzzles. Kaboose has a fun online quiz that children can take based on traditional St. Patrick’s Day traditions. The great thing about this game is it gives feedback and facts when a child answers the questions right or wrong including pictures. There are also more games on this page including coloring pages and puzzles. Primary Games – St. Patrick’s Day Games and A Kid’s Heart – Holiday Games also have great online games with St. Patrick’s Day themes for kids to play and learn.

Activity Village – St. Patrick’s Day Crafts

Crafting is always a fun home learning activity. Activity Village is a great resource for all types of crafting activities based on holidays. Each of their hands on activities includes a photos of the steps of the project, the materials required, and specific instructions. This is very organized and helpful for parents planning and assisting children with a crafting activity. For St. Patrick’s Day, they have activities where children can make a shamrock, a leprechaun hat, rainbow necklaces, a pot of gold, sun catchers, and placemats.

This St. Patrick’s Day can be filled with learning, crafting, and fun online activities.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Test Taking Strategies

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Over the next few months, most children in the United States will be taking a variety of standardized tests to measure their learning gains. This includes state and federally mandated tests, like the FCAT in Florida, and also SAT and ACT testing for high school students. Building knowledge is an essential skill to performing well on a test, however there are other test taking strategies and preparation that can help your child be successful on standardized tests.

There are many online resources that can help children to improve their test taking skills. Some websites provide information that parents can pass on to their children through practice of certain strategies, while others provide an online test taking environment.

Test Taking Tips

One website with valuable test taking information is www.testtakingtips.com. This site is great for older children and parents. They have check lists of information for test taking, note taking, reducing test anxiety, study skills, and even a specific section for parents. These tips can then be applied when a student is completing home learning assignments, studying for a quiz or test, or actually taking a quiz or test in the classroom. Practicing the skills before a high-stakes test allows the child to practice the skills and see their success.

General test taking tips include preparing properly for the test (studying, paying attention in class, taking notes, reviewing, completing homework, etc.), get a good night’s sleep, eat a good breakfast, and plan to be early so you are not rushed. Some important tips for taking test that include multiple choice options are to read all of the choices before selecting an answer, eliminate answers that you know aren’t correct, think of the answer before reading the choices.

Other similar resources for test taking and learning guides include:

Study Guides & Strategies

Scholastic – Standardized Tests

Interactive Test Taking Programs for Kids

Houghton Mifflin has a great math education page for kids in grades one through six to practice math test taking strategies. The site is broken down into three components: test quest, test prep practice, and brain teasers. Test Quest includes information about test taking strategies specifically for math, you select the topic, and then the child will be given a sample question using the strategy being taught, then they get to try using the strategy on their own. Once a child feels confident they have learned the various strategies they can go onto the test prep practice section where they will take can utilize the strategies further in a 10 question test based on math and study skills. The brain teasers section provides enrichment learning with math-based word problems.

Review Sample Tests

Many states also have samples of their standardized tests including previous tests that have been released that can be found online. If you search by using the key words “practice test for” and then include the state, you will find many resources. These can be used at home to help children to practice answering the questions and utilizing the skills they learned from the resources above. As the test nears, you can offer practice at home using the same timing and testing conditions.

Test taking skills are not just a natural ability, learning the skills and practicing can help a child to achieve higher testing scores.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

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Winter Learning Activities: The Aquarium

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:00:00 GMT

During the winter, many children and families will be spending their weekend time indoors. The weekend offers a great opportunity to visit local area museums. Many larger cities have aquariums which are great places to visit that are fun and educational and the winter provides a perfect opportunity to escape into their warmth.

Before going to the aquarium, you should prepare your children for what they will see and learn. It is also good to have follow-up activities based on what they found to be the most interesting exhibit that they saw on their visit. The Internet is a great resource for information.

Visit the Aquarium’s Website

When planning a visit to an aquarium, the aquarium websites are a great resource to help to plan your trip. Popular Aquariums include The Georgia Aquarium, Shedd Aquarium, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Tennessee Aquarium, and Mote Aquarium. The focus of many aquariums includes rehabilitation, responsible action toward marine animals, rescuing hurt animals, and research to help support the marine animal’s natural environments. The museum sites can help you to plan your trip by including information about the exhibits, feeding times, and various programs they offer for children.

Virtual Aquarium Trips

If you do not have an aquarium in your area, visiting an aquarium website can provide a great home activity for a virtual field trip. Many of their websites include web cams on popular attractions from their aquariums. This can provide a spring board to find subjects that your child may be interested in exploring further.

Virtual Fish Tank

The Virtual Fish Tank website allows children to build their own virtual fish online and then release it into the FishTank exhibit. This is in conjunction with several science museums. Children create an account with their parents and then they get to add four of their own designed fish to the larger tank. They can also see other children’s creations.

The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies

The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies provides information about research, rescues, conservation, and education about marine animals. It is a great resource for kids to learn about protecting wild marine life. Online components of their website include tracking sea turtles, learning how to protect and notify of dolphin strandings in the Gulf of Mexico, and learn about the continued effected of the oil spill.

Aquariums and virtual learning about marine wildlife helps children to learn protecting wild animals, learning more about their environment, safety, and care to protect their animals. The Internet has vast resources to provide children with vast resources for learning.

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Web 2.0 Sites for Kids

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Web 2.0 was the factor that changed the Internet from a passive environment for consumption of data to the current interactive read-write web. There are many online sites for children that provide unique learning opportunities for kids. Many of the websites are geared to learning at home online.

Make Beliefs Comics

Making comic strips has always been a fun pastime for children. It involves spelling, storytelling, drawing, and sequence skills. Make Beliefs Comics is a great website for children to create their own comics. It is an easy to use an online program where children choose from a wide selection of characters (including various moods), backgrounds, thought and talking balloons, panel prompts, objects, and senses. Once objects are added, they can be moved, scaled, layered, flipped, or removed. Children can also choose the number of panels, create a title, add their name as the author. Once their masterpiece is complete they can print or email their finished comic strip. The great thing about this site is that it is free and children do not need to create an account. One complication is that it is difficult to save comics to be finished at a later time.

Time Toast

Time Toast is an online timeline creation program. Children can easily make a timeline including dates, titles, descriptions, and photos. This would be a great site for kids who are interested in a specific historical tracking. It can also be used as a creative project idea for open-ended assignments that are given in class to be created at home. Timelines can be shared with others, or set to private, and they are also printable. In order to save a timeline, the child must create an account.

Museum Box

A great Web 2.0 for social studies is Museum Box. This interactive site allows children to create a “museum box” to store text, photos, video, and audio into an online storage box. Learning ideas include creating a “box” that contains important facts and features about a specific person, time, or event. An account needs to be created in order to save your box. This site is very user friendly and would be a very creative and different idea for your child to use for project-based assignments.

Create a Graph

The National Center for Education Statistics maintains a website for kids that includes an online program called Create a Graph. On this site, children can create bar, line, area, pie, and line graphs. Graph skills are important to learn because they are used frequently in our everyday lives to understand complex information on the news and in society. Children get to choose the design and appearance, add data and labels, review their work, and then print, email or save their graphs. Great ideas for home use would include making a graph of their chore duties, graphing the amount of money spent from their piggy bank, or to graph the temperature. Other educational examples are provided on the website. This would also be a great tool to use for at home learning projects assigned from school.

Web 2.0 websites make it easy for children to create many unique and creative projects online.

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Leap Day Activities

Lauren Grossberg — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Today is a unique day on the calendar. It is leap day. This is a great learning opportunity for your children. They can learn about the history of the day, why it has been added into the calendar, and use the Internet to create their own leap year calendar.

This year will be 366 days long instead of 365. Leap day is added into our calendar every four years. This additional day was added to the calendar to keep alignment with the earth’s revolutions around the sun over 2,000 years ago by Julius Cesar. It takes 365.242199 days in order for the earth to revolve around the sun. If leap days were not added, the calendar would actually be off in comparison to the revolutions. Within 100 years, it would be off by over 24 days!

Math Activities for Leap Day

Scholastic has a page for math questions about leap year. This includes questions like what are the next leap years, comparison of leap years to birthdays, and days of the week that leap days fall on. This could be a fun challenge activity to do over dinner on leap day.

Online Calendar Creator

DLTK has an online calendar creator that is easy for kids to use. They can select the theme of their calendar ranging from animals to popular cartoon characters. Once they print their calendar, you can use this for learning activities. You can have your child circle leap day and other popular holidays on the calendar. They can also compare several years of calendars to see when the next leap day and leap year will occur. You can then hang their calendars on a pin board in their bedroom.

Great Leap Day Resource

Home School Coach has a very extensive blog post about leap year and leap days based on her personal experiences with leap day. This site has great ideas for home learning and leap day. The information on this site includes why we have leap years, when they are, trivia based on leap days, rhymes, party ideas, activities, and books.

Animal-based Leap Day Activities

For younger children, many activities about leap day involve using animals that leap to help to explain the idea. Typically, frogs are used as a leaping off point for learning about leap day. eHow has a site with several frog-related activities.

Science Activities

Enchanted Learning has a great visual diagram and explanation of leap year. This picture includes an explanation. The page also contains facts, rhymes, and trivia. This activity would be perfect for upper elementary and middle school students.

Leap day can be celebrated at home through learning activities and crafts. It is easy to incorporate math, history, science and crafting while learning about leap day and leap years.

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Online Contests for Kids

Lauren Grossberg — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

There are many online contests that kids can enter by completing various projects at home. Entering into a contest, creating a finished product, coming up with unique ideas that involve creative “out-of-the-box” thinking should be encouraged at home with careful adult supervision. The following contests are sponsored by legitimate, well-known websites.

Doodle for Google

Doodle for Google is a competition that is held yearly where children get to design the Google banner based on a selected theme for that year. Children can submit one drawing, which can be created by hand or digitally each year. The theme this year is “If I could travel in time, I’d visit.” Entries are due by March 23^rd.

Dream to Do

For the Lenovo Dream to Do contest, children in grades K-8 submit a drawing of what they want to do when they grow up. The contest runs through April 16^th. After submission of their drawing, friends, family, classmates, and teachers can vote on their drawing. The school with the most votes of their drawings will win a $50,000 technology makeover for their school.

Build Big Contest

The Design Squad Build Big contest encourages children to form a team to create a larger version of one of the Design Squad Nation activities from their website. The teams then need to video tape their adaption in action. The team must consist of at least one individual under 18 and one individual over 18. This could be a great project for a family. The entries are anticipated to be open starting in March.

Google Science Fair

The Google Science Fair provides an online environment for children ages 13 to 18 can enter a unique science fair project online. The due date for submissions is April 1^st. Prizes range from family trips to work experience opportunities. More information about the directions and contest rules can be found on their website.

Writers Contest

The PBS Kids Go! Writers Contest is a writing online contest for kids in kindergarten through 3^rd grade. Entry for this contest began in January. Depending on age, the word count must be between 50 and 350 words and include 5 drawings illustrating their story. Prizes include tablet computer, e-readers, and MP3 players.

Contests can be a great learning opportunity for children at home. They can also be projects that can involve the entire family.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

Picture By mikecogh

Free Educational Resources | Interactive Whiteboard Games and Lessons by Learning Today

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Cool Sites for Kids

Lauren Grossberg — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

The Internet is a vast resource of tools, activities, and games for children to explore. Here are sites that I have recently found that will catch a child’s interest along with providing a learning opportunity.

Building Blocks for a Healthy Future

Building Blocks has a wide variety of children’s games on their website. I was really impressed with the quality and variety of the games. This site includes learning games that focus on music, weather, memorization, feelings, and matching. This site also has free books, stories about the characters, and sing-along songs. This site is geared toward pre-school and lower elementary aged children.

Discovery Kids – Yucky

The Yuckiest Site on the Internet, hosted by Discovery Kids, is a very catchy website that boys will definitely love. Wendell, a worm reporter, is your guide through the Yucky site. Kids can learn about roaches, worms, cool and gross things about the body, science experiments for home, and playing science-based online games. Children can also ask Wendell a question, and their answers will be posted to his site with answers. Reading through the questions is also a fun and gross time too!

Wonderopolis

Wonderopolis is a website where children can learn about a curious wonder of a world. Each day a new wonder is posted including a video and an article. There is then an interactive portion to learn more about the wonder as well, referred to as the “Try This” section. Another section includes “Wonder words to know and use” which pulls out the vocabulary words that children should try and use throughout the day. Children can also rate the Wonder of the Day and post and share responses and options about the article and wonder. This would be a great activity to do at home as a family after a school day or on the weekend.

Learning Games for Kids

Learning Games for Kids is a website with educational games. There are games for a wide variety of subject areas can help to build upon topics and knowledge that is learned in school. Children can search by topic. The games included vary from scrambles, videos, matching, jigsaws, word finds, and spelling activities. The activities would be great for younger children, but beware that this site does have advertisements.

The Internet is a great resource for fun, learning, and interactive games that parents can access and help children learn at home.

Article By Laura Ketcham-VanHellemont

Picture By Tim & Selena Middleton

Free Educational Resources | Interactive Whiteboard Games and Lessons by Learning Today

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