History

The Timeline of Food

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Ever wonder how the ancient Romans fed their armies? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? What your great-grandparent’s favorite dessert was? Who invented the potato chip…and why? So do we!!!

Food history presents a fascinating buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some experts say it’s impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods are not invented; they evolve.

Whether you’re looking for the origin of coffee or hamburgers in America, or want to know who invented Twinkies or Coca Cola, this fascinating food timeline – with hundreds of clickable notes and lots more in-depth information when you want it –  makes the history of food both fun and educational.

CLICK HERE to go to the website!

Writing

Learning to Write the Slow and Steady Way

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If your elementary age student is having trouble writing, check out this simple but very helpful step-by-step resource site. HelpWithWriting.com offers a sequential program divided into five units or “building blocks”, each containing a short movie, a lesson, and seven free printable worksheets to reinforce each lesson.

from the website:

Helping With Writing.com is a website to guide you, the parent, on how to support your children with all their writing projects; the objective of this site is to improve your children’s writing. I begin with basic sentence structure and take you step by step through mini movies, lessons, and worksheets ending with your children being able to use nouns, collective nouns, prepositions and verbs correctly in all their writing. Write On!

I have designed the program so that your children build their writing skills taking baby steps (no tricks of the trade or hoops to jump through), but simple. I recommend that they do one worksheet per day to build a strong foundation and gradually develop their skills. Taking bite sizes pieces everyday is easier for them to digest than a huge turkey dinner all in one sitting.

Childrens’ attention spans are short and sweet.  Work within their limitations.  Slow and steady wins the race.

CLICK HERE to go to the website!

Math

Simple Math Games

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HelpingWithMath.com offers loads of simple math games for elementary grade students. The games here are not filled with lots of hyper animation and distractions, and have solid learning value. Games include times tables, place value, rounding, ordering numbers, skip counting, fractions, and many more. If you’re doing elementary level math, you will probably find several games here you can incorporate into your homeschool for reviewing lessons and some educational fun.

They also have a huge collection of worksheets, flash cards, and other printable resources to help teach and reinforce math concepts. No login or account required.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

Language Arts

Helping with Verbs

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HelpingWithVerbs.com is designed to help students improve their writing through the correct use of verbs in sentences.

There are six main lessons on the site, each with a series of printable worksheets that can be worked through by students. These provide lots of examples and opportunities for practice through extensive and varied exercises. The lessons teach students how to use verbs in their everyday writing.

Each worksheet is packed with information on historical events, the natural world and/or legendary people — so students not only develop their written communication skills, but they also learn about the world around them. This takes the focus away from the grueling grammatical exercises and puts the focus on the information.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

Just for Fun

Christmas with Mother Goose #2

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Christmas with Mother Goose (PDF e-comic book)

This year we found yet another delightful vintage collection of Christmas comic book stories for young at heart readers of all ages, by the incomparable Walt Kelly! These feature Mother Goose characters and of course good ol’ Santa in some truly classic children’s comics and poems – very funny and well written, with some of the best artwork ever done for young children’s comics. This is “just for fun” stuff your kids will adore. And if you want some educational value from it, check out the “months of the year” story for little ones learning just that. Don’t miss it!

RIGHT CLICK HERE and “save” to your computer. Mac users, press the “control” key and click the link, and save to your mac!

Holidays, Just for Fun

Christmas with Mother Goose #1

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Here’s a delightful vintage collection of Christmas comic book stories for young at heart readers of all ages, by the incomparable Walt Kelly! It features the classic Mother Goose characters in some truly classic children’s comics and poems – very funny and well written, with some of the best artwork ever done for young children’s comics. Don’t miss it!

To download this PDF comic book, RIGHT CLICK HERE and “save as” to your computer.
(It’s a big file… 22 megs, so allow a little time for it to download.)

History, Holidays, Living Books

The First New England Christmas

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“The First New England Christmas: A Story of Life in the Colonies” by Stone & Frickett (PDF ebook)

Today’s resource is this excellent short story of the first Christmas in New England, in the year 1620. If you’ve been curious as to how the early Pilgrims celebrated Christmas, read this – you may be surprised at what you discover!

To download this PDF ebook, RIGHT CLICK HERE and “save” to your computer. Mac users, press the “control” key then click the link and save to your mac.

Audio, Living Books

Rip Van Winkle & The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Audio Dramatizations!)

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Washington Irving was an American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” published in 1819.

In “Rip Van Winkle” a lazy villager named Rip Van Winkle falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains and wakes up 20 years later, having missed the American Revolution. Here are two great AUDIO versions of this classic tale.

Rip Van Winkle (Old Time Radio version)
Rip Van Winkle (Walter Houston narration)

Next, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, you’ll hear his famous story of a mean spirited, dim-witted schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane and the events leading up to his meeting with the headless you know who. Oooo! Great fun! (28 minutes)

Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Click the links above to play these audios online, or to download, RIGHT CLICK and “save as” to your computer!

Freebie Roundup

Earth Science, Dads & Daughters, Art Zone & more

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More treasures from our archives, resurrected just for you…

THE EARTH SCIENCE PICTURE OF THE DAY

This neat site has a new high-definition photo of some fascinating earth-science subject every day… along with a few paragraphs discussing the phenomenon depicted. Great way to interest your kids in geological topics in daily bite-sized doses!

CLICK HERE to go to the site

50 RULES FOR DADS OF DAUGHTERS

This is a link to a blog post that is just a delight, full of humor, wisdom and great advice. We loved it, and knew you would too. So go read it:

CLICK HERE to go to the site

NGA Kids’ THE ART ZONE

The National Gallery of Art has developed an amazing array of interactive art project activities for kids to create their own works of art online. These are obviously graphics heavy, but if you have a high speed connection, your kids will love these projects: Create animated scenes; Create portraits and landscape paintings in the style of American primitive artists; create crazy collages; and much more! Your kids can go creative hog-wild here!

CLICK HERE to go to the site

CLIPART ETC.

This online service of Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse is a wonderful education oriented clipart collection for students & teachers… 60,000 pieces of free clipart and growing every week. No ads, images in several sizes, well categorized collection. Licensed for use by students
& teachers w/out further permission. Great stuff!

CLICK HERE to go to the site

Freebie Roundup

Music Theory, Bats, Maps, Simple Machines & Lego-mobiles

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Here’s another batch of great freebie resources from our archives, just for you!

MUSIC THEORY LESSONS & EXERCISES

Want a simple, easy-to-follow tutorial on the basics of reading & understanding music? MusicTheory.net offers a great series of step-by-step lessons and hands-on lessons & tools to help you teach basic music theory.

All of the lessons, exercises and tools are FREE on the website when accessed by your computer. You must enable Javascript to access the materials. Note that they also sell the same lessons if you want to use them on mobile devices and phones.

CLICK HERE to go to the site!

HANG OUT WITH BATS!

BatsLive is a virtual field trip into the amazing world of bats! The site contains dozens of interactive resources, including video tours, lesson plans, webinars, and printable resources about bats. Here’s their introduction to this extensive and well-done resource site:

Bats are vital to healthy ecosystems and human economies worldwide. As primary predators of night-flying insects, bats consume enormous quantities of agricultural pests and reduce the need for chemical pesticides. Yet these wonderfully diverse and beneficial creatures are among the least studied and most misunderstood of animals. Bats are threatened worldwide, and their colonies and habitats are destroyed – both intentionally and inadvertently – because of myths, misinformation, and lack of scientific knowledge and understanding. Bat populations are declining almost everywhere in North America especially due to the devastating White-nose Syndrome. Losing bats has far-reaching consequences for natural ecosystems and human economies. Knowledge is the key to their conservation and protection.

BatsLIVE: A Distance Learning Adventure is an exciting, free education program for children in the 4-8th grades and their educators, that will bring bat conservation to life in your classroom or community.

CLICK HERE to go to the site

200,000 MAPS OF THE WORLD

Wow! This website from France has an incredible collection of downloadable maps of the world, continents & countries in multiple graphic formats (GIF, PDF, CDR, SVG, AI and WMF). They also have a large collection of Historical Maps from different time periods. Go to the site, bookmark it, and use it whenever you need specific maps for studies or projects. Our link is to the English language version of the site.

To go to the site, CLICK HERE

SIMPLE MACHINES NOTEBOOKING PAGES

Betsy at NotebookingNook.com has put together this neat little resource page on some of the “simple machines” we use every single day, but hardly even think about. Here’s what she says about it:

In the past, when we have studied simple machines, I found it easy to find information on this topic but not as simple to find good free resources. My son and I had an occasion to discuss simple machines this week and I remembered how difficult it was to find what I needed once upon a time and thought I’d put something together for any of you looking for something on this topic. I hope this helps.

Included in her PDF download are: Notebooking pages & matchbooks for levers, wheel & axle, the pulley, inclined plane, wedges and screws.
Also on the page are links to 5 short, simple online videos explaining and demonstrating how these “simple machines” work.

CLICK HERE here to go to the site!

LEGO BALLOON CAR PROJECT

Okay, LEGO builders. Here’s today’s engineering challenge for you: Can you build a LEGO car that zooms across the floor that uses a balloon as its engine/source of power? All you should use for this project are LEGO parts, LEGO wheels if you have them, and a balloon.

There’s no one “right” way to do this, but you might keep in mind:
Which way the balloon opens
Horizontal to vertical stability
Balloon staying away from tires

Try to invent your own working Balloon Car first… and then, if you get finished, or stuck, or are ready to see how some other students did it and solved their own “engineering” problems, you can click the link below:

CLICK HERE  to go to the webpage (after you’ve tried to build this yourself)!