Sometimes you find interesting things in places you don’t expect.  While browsing I happened on the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising website for high school and college educators.  At first I just expected it to be a site students could use for research on the fashion industry, but I soon realized its greater potential. [...]

Going turtle hunting is even more fun that catching frogs – and OK only if the turtles are quickly released into the lake.  After finding such a great website on frogs, I decided to look for a similar one on turtles.  I didn’t find anything similar, but I did find KidsKonnect, which is a safe [...]

One summer when I was a kid there were so many frogs that they would jump into the cabin when someone opened the door.  We wore flip flops at night so we wouldn’t step on them.  I haven’t seen so many frogs in one place since, but I have seen how excited kids get when [...]

Being at the lake where internet access comes and goes is not the best place to write a blog.  It is a good place, however, to read newspapers and find ideas.  An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune lead me to kitchenpantryscientist, which is an excellent blog written by a woman who is both a [...]

You never know what you will discover from a vacation at the lake. We were outside at our traditional evening campfire when we saw what looked like a UFO going up over the lake.  It turned out to be some kind of small hot air balloon made by people down the beach.  We watched it [...]

Don’t you think there’s a natural curiosity about natural disasters.  You have probably already built a model of a volcano and used a soda bottle to simulate a tornado, but have you ever done a lesson on floods?  The Delaware River Basin Commission has some interesting kid-friendly flood activities and links.  Got to the PBS [...]

The hot summer weather has made me think about activities that might be fun for kids relating to temperature and heat.  How about making a thermometer or figuring out whether you can really fry an egg on the sidewalk?  Haven’t you always wanted to try that?  And don’t you love the web for actually helping [...]

I’m not usually all that enthusiastic about drill and practice, but the organization FreeRice has come up with an interesting concept.  What a combo – online quizzing combined with the motivation of giving.  John Breen founded FreeRice in 2007 and donated the site to the UN World Food Program in March, 2009.
FreeRice combines an interest in [...]

The website SoftSchools has numerous online games for math, language arts, science, social studies, Spanish and French.  There are games for students in Pre-K through Middle School.  I suggest testing the games before using them because some are more boring than others and the graphics differ greatly from one to the next.  Most of the [...]

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has some wonderful resources for teachers and students.  Research has shown that music can have an effect on health so the NIEHS has created a library of sing-along songs that are both fun and educational.  The songs are indexed topically and alphabetically.  You cannot download any music, but [...]