Academic Musings & Tech for Learning

A joint project of Discovery Education & WM Waste Management, Think Green has a very comprehensive set of resources for K-8 classrooms, and some for 9-12 as well, online. Included are lesson plans, hands-on activities, videos, interactive activities and some great classroom display materials. All of these are free, and no registration is required.

The interactive activity, Energy Consumption has links to worksheets, explains BTU’s and students calculate and compare costs of using different fuels and insulation to heat and cool a home in San Francisco, Dallas and Minnesota. There are many activities linked to this interactive.

Future Power includes a virtual lab. Links to videos and articles are embedded in the activity. Students compare the costs and CO2 emissions of natural gas and coal mixtures. Unfortunately the lab doesn’t include other fuel options, but perhaps students can investigate those as well. It is still  a very useful activity and challenges students to plan, experiment and report their findings.

How to Light Up a Room is another virtual lab that studies the effect of different window coverings on temperature. Students can run the experiments, compare and chart data.

Power Up is a fairly simple interactive activity where students complete a pie chart that identifies how much electrical energy is provided by different fuel sources in the US. Written information is provided for each source (grades 5 +). Mineral Resources – Recycling Aluminum is a one-session interactive good for lower grades.

Overall this is an exceptional collection of resources that can used to enrich learning in science and other disciplines.

Children in the class used laptops to visit a site to hear animal sounds at kiddyhouse.com – http://www.kiddyhouse.com/Farm/ . This site was simple to access, and easy for a young audience to use. Another site with an animal farm is www.kbears.com/farm/ . The Kbears website has several other interactive worlds for primary grades (2-4) and a library of 100 animals. The kindergarten class had fun clicking and listening to the sounds of farm animals. Then we all went to \label the parts of a horse at the BBC schools web site. Flash interactives for Ourselves includes labelling parts of a horse, a fish and a human. The students were thrilled to drag and drop the labels on the right parts. Check it out here . Click on the “Ourselves” icon to continue to the label activity.

BTW… the BBC Schools website is a fabulous resource for students of all ages. Lots of kindergarten students read Eric Carle books. For ideas to use in the classroom, check out the website – many teachers have submitted great ideas at http://www.eric-carle.com/catexchange.html.