Multiplication Fact Practice on Interactive Whiteboard!

Learn Your Tables is a website from the UK that works well with interactive whiteboards or Promethean ActivSlates. There are 3 different ways to practice multiplication facts: Drag and Drop, Enter the Answer, or Assessment. If you choose Drag and Drop, your screen will populate with multiplication facts on the left and the answers on the right. Use the Promethean board to have students drag and drop the multiplication fact onto the corresponding answer. (See below)

If you choose to "enter the answer", you will presented with one fact at a time, and a keypad in which to enter the answer. This view also works well with the Promethean board. (See below)

Create Jeopardy Games Fast and Easy!

Jeopardy Labs is a website that has an amazing Jeopardy game builder. It was built by Matt Johnson, an undergraduate students at Washington State University. His website allows you to build interactive Jeopardy games without PowerPoint and it is MUCH easier than PowerPoint. You do not even need to create an account in order to build your game. As Matt explains on his website: "When you save your template, you are given a URL to play the template. Something like jeopardylabs.com/play/your-title. You are also given a URL to edit the template, something like jeopardylabs.com/edit/your-title. Just type that into your browser when you want to edit."

Creating a game is super easy. Simply click on a category and type in the word to describe your category. Then click on a question with a point value. You will be given a screen where you can enter the question and the answer. Jeopardy labs puts it together to make it pretty. When you are ready to play the game, you can enter in the points of each team manually into the site before proceeding to the next question. Easy! I don't usually recommend Jeopardy because of the time it takes to create within PowerPoint, but this site takes care of that!

Summer Math Practice

The last post was about summer reading practice, so it only makes sense to follow up with summer math practice! Parents often ask me how they can practice basic skills with their children over the summer. Begone, worksheets and workbooks! Look online for some of the best math practice and manipulatives to help you work on your math skills:

• Arcademic Skill Builders: Mostly math games for elementary kids
• Fun 4 the Brain: games for multiplication, addition, subtraction, and division
• ABCya!: Addition Games
• Ghost Blasters: Practice your multiples
• Mavin's Math Mysteries: Solve math mysteries
• Kids and Cookies: Practice division and fractions
• Base 10 Block Game: Fun!
• Primary Games: Math practice, as well as other subject areas
• Math Playground: manipulatives and games
• City Planner: Practice with fractions
• Division with 2 Digit Divisors: great for modeling to children
• Division with remainders: related to the site above, but with remainders
• Interactive Clock: Best practice for helping your child tell time
  

Games for Elementary Kids

With summer fast approaching, are you looking for educational games to recommend to your students? Here is just a partial list of some of my favorite sites that reinforce basic skills:

• Arcademic Skill Builders: Mostly LA and math games
• Brain Training Games: Keep your brain in shape
• Fun 4 The Brain: math, LA and science games
• Free Rice: For every correct answer, rice is donated to a hungry family
• Math Playground: math games
• Scrabble Online
• Statetris: Like Tetris, but with geography
• Spelling City: spelling practice
• KidZone: games in many subjects
• Kerpoof: great for comics and digital storytelling

Games for the Classroom

Looking for an educational way to fill a few extra minutes at the end of the lesson? Need an engaging, educational warm up? Maybe these classroom game websites can provide you with what you need! Many of the games on these sites also work well with your eInstruction Chalkboard, Promethean Board, interactive whiteboard, or Promethean Slate.

Novel Games


Novel Games is a site that promotes healthy, non-violent, educational games that the whole family can enjoy. There are several categories to choose from, and the best part is that the games can be embedded into your website, blog, wiki, or social networking site.


Eclipse Crosswords


Eclipse Crosswords is a software download, and there are many counties where teachers are not able to download software on their school computers. However, keep in mind you can download this software on your home computer and create your crossword puzzles there. This software makes it incredibly easy to create a crossword puzzle. Just enter in the words and the clues, and the software does the rest of the work for you!


Brain Training Games



Brain Training Games requires you to create an account with an email address, but this is so the site can track your progress. Login to the site, play the brain games, track your progress, and play against friends. This is a fun and easy way to keep your mind healthy and give it a work out.


Fun 4 the Brain


Fun4theBrain is a site for elementary students to practice basic skills in addition, multiplication, division, subtraction, and English. The site creator is constantly adding games to the site, and students do not need an email address or account to play the games.

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Fun, Educational Sites for Kids

Biology Resources for Teachers

ARKive

ARKive's mission is to bring together the best photographs and video footage of threatened species around the world in hopes of having a concise, organized database of these organisms. They partnered with some of the best wildlife photographers in the world so that teachers, students, and the general public may learn more about these threatened species and act to save them. You can search for species by their classification (mammal, amphibian, insect, plant, etc), and each threatened species you click on provides detailed information about that species.

There is also an educator section of ARKive, which I was pleasantly surprised to see has FREE multimedia resources on topics such as: plant life cycles, adaptations, food chains and webs, habitats, ecosystems, predator and prey, natural selection, and much more. The resources are PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos on the topic. This is truly a worthwhile site!

Biology in Motion

Biology in Motion is is a site dedicated to providing short animations to explain biology concepts such as: enzyme characteristics and intestinal gas. In addition, there are several interactive activities and simulations that give students practice with concepts like: Meiosis, Mitosis, evolution, digestion, enery, cell division, and the cardiovascular system. While this site is not as extensive as ARKive, it is a helpful supplemental site if you are teaching one of these concepts.

Word Games for Elementary Students

Are you looking for a fun way to practice word skills with your students? Here are a few sites that practice important concepts in a fun way, especially if you have an interactive whiteboard to use in your class.

Punctuation Paintball: Use the paintball guns to shoot correct punctuation onto the sentences provided. If you click the website and it asks you to register, choose "Maybe Later" to go directly to the game without adding any personal information. There are 3 different levels of difficulty to choose from.

Other games that can be used to practice word skills:

• Quiz Hub: Homophones
• Construct-A-Word (choose beginnings to match an ending to create a word)
• Synonym and Antonym Game
• Suffix Game
• Prefix Game
• Contraction Game
• Spelling City
• MadLibs Online
• Roy the Zebra interactive word games

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Tic Tac Toe in 3D

So you think you are an expert at the child’s game Tic Tac Toe? Now try it in 3D at MathsNet Interactive! This game was designed in 3D to prevent the first player from always winning. Instead of connecting three in a row to win, you have to connect two rows that meet at a right angle to form an “L”. You are the blue marbles, and the computer plays the part of the red. By clicking and dragging the 3D shape, you can rotate and spin the cube so that you can see your game board from all angles. Check it out! This would be a great follow-up activity to teaching about 3D solids in Geometry, not to mention it would also work well with an Interactive Whiteboard.

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Carve a Pumpkin Online

Welcome, Fall! October is here!

To get into the Halloween spirit, why not carve a pumpkin online? There are two sites that I have found that are fun.

The first one located at theoworlds has the most options for your pumpkin. It gives you to option to cut “freeform” or with straight lines only. When you connect the lines of your cut, then the piece automatically falls out of your pumpkin. You can change the background picture, add your own message, print your pumpkin, save it to view later, or send it to your friends in an email. Don’t forget you can turn on and off the spooky background music! As you can see from the picture above, the pumpkin is realistic instead of a cartoon. I like it!

The second pumpkin site is called the “Pumpkin Simulator”. You have a cartoon pumpkin to carve on, and when you are finished, you click, “done”. At that time, a lit candle is added to your pumpkin and spooky music plays. It doesn’t have any of the other options as the first pumpkin site, but it still provides entertainment! Happy Halloween!

Games for the Interactive White Board

Promethean boards, Smart Boards, Polyvision Boards - I don’t care what you call them, they are all interactive white boards and work by interacting with your computer so that software and websites can be controlled from the board and not your computer station.

Interactive white boards provide an excellent opportunity for students to directly interact with content. It allows them to get up out of their seats, come to the board, and learn. What used to be a demonstration in a one computer classroom becomes an interactive group experience with an interactive whiteboard.

Click here to see a list of different interactive white boards, tutorials, and lesson ideas.

There are several websites that work well with an interactive white board. My newest find is “Roy: The Singing Zebra” at the Guided Reading and Reading Games with Roy website. This site has a WHOLE section of guided reading games created with the interactive white board in mind. By projecting these reading games, students can come up to the board and drag and drop answers into place. Have them do this as individuals or as teams. (See pic below for a sample from Roy’s site.)

Check out their list of games here. They have games for the alphabet, consonants, high frequency words, singular and plural, vowels, rhyming words, and words within words.
For those of you who already have Promethean Boards, check out these sites for additional resources:

Promethean Planet

Promethean USA

Promethean Learning

However, there are other sites that I have mentioned in previous posts that are still wonderful resources when used with an interactive white board:

Statetris: Like tetris, but with geographical locations

Lite Bright: Use to teach shapes, symmetry, and geometry

Interactive Clock: One of the best ways to teach time, in my opinion

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives

Create a Graph

Visit Planet Science! So Cool!

Planet Science is a site from the UK, which sometimes causes educators in the USA to pass it by. I don’t know why - many of the interactive, educational sites worth visiting come from the UK. Ok, so they spell things a little differently and use the metric system (like everywhere else but here)! Their sites still rock!

Planet Science has interactive games for K-12 students. I played a few of them and have enjoyed ALL of them so far. The first one I tried was the Smoothie maker. You can choose the ingredients to add to a blender to make your own smoothie. When you’re done, start the blender! The site will tell you how nutritious your smoothie is complete with how many grams of sugar and how many carbs you just drank in your smoothie. The best part is the “Smoothie” song the site plays as it mixes your drink. So much fun!

Next I tried Planet 10: World Builder (because Earth can’t last forever). The student creates a new planet by choosing many, many different things such as: size, orbit, atmosphere, shape, moons, terrain, organisms, distance from sun, etc. After you make all of your choices, you launch your planet into the atmosphere and see if it “survives” in space. After a lot of careful planning, I managed to burn up all the living organisms, evaporated my atmosphere, and got hit by a comet. Disaster. But so much fun!

Planet 10: Solar System is also a nice resource. Students can zoom into different planets to learn more about them. Fun! It has better graphics than Google Sky, but I’m not sure if the information is as detailed as Google Sky.

The site also has a list of science games on the Internet that are worth looking into as well as a parent page to get them involved. I love this site! Thumbs up from me!

Mandala Maker perfect for math concepts

Yet another cool website can be found through the GirlsGoTech.org page. It’s a mandala maker that allows you to create a symmetrical design using basic shapes and colors, and can be used in the classroom to reinforce geometric concepts in math. As kids work on their design, they can preview the finished design to see if they want to go back and make changes. Here is the design that I created below:

Statetris: Geography Fun!

Check out this new site called Statetris! This online game is very similar to the old favorite game called Tetris where you have to fit falling geometric shapes together as they fall from the sky. Statetris is similar, only instead of geometric shapes, you can use states for the United States map, or countries for continent maps. Imagine how much fun it could be reviewing for a geography test with this site. Fun, fun!

Make a wild animal!

Another great site is Switch Zoo. This site used to be entirely free, but over the last year or so they started packaging the “game” for sale on CD. I have to admit, this is one of my biggest pet peeves as a teacher. You find a great, free site to use with your class, and as soon as you make it part of your routine, the site becomes a paid site. Anyway, some features of this site are still free (just enough to hook you). I had my class create a new animal, print it out in color, and then build a habitat out of clay to match their new animal. Have your class:

1. Create a name for the new animal
2. Create a habitat
3. Explain how the animal adapts to survive in the habitat
4. Explain what the animal eats, how it gets food, and how it protects itself.
5. Write a creative story about the new animal: “My New Pet”, “A Strange Day at the Zoo”

Build Your Wild Self: Make yourself into a wild animal!

Okay - I know I feature a lot of websites, but maybe it’s because I know how hard it is to get software approved for classroom use in the schools today. I came across this website called “Build Your Wild Self” put out by New York Zoos and Aquariums. The site starts you will a human boy or girl template, and allows you to change different parts of your body to animal parts. Why would you want to do this? Besides being fun for children and adults, teachers can incorporate this into their classroom for creative writing or science. Just think: Let students create themselves as an animal, print it out, and then write about it. Students can explain how their new animal body parts allow them to survive in the chosen habitat. Or how about different writing topics to go along with this such as:

Explain how your life would be different if you came home from school looking like this.
What sports or activities would you be good at now that you are part animal?

Research the different animals that you picked and why you would want to be like that animal.

Sight Words with Samson

Sight words with Samson is an interactive site to help children learn basic sight words in English. There are very few good sites online that allow children to practice sight vocabulary, but this site is worth mentioning. Sight words with Samson also outlines 10 reasons why practicing sites words are important to a child’s development on their site. I recommend this site for children learning to read as well as English-as-a-second-language learners. Even though it is a paid site, the fee is nominal. For one family, it will cost you $29.95 a year. For one teacher, it will cost you $79.95 a year, but the teacher will also have 30 usernames associated with the registration so that everyone in the class can have his or her own username.

Fun Educational Websites for Kids

There are so many websites, and so little time. How do you find websites worthy to share in your class? First, network! If you find a good site, post it to your del.icio.us account, an online website where you can share your favorite websites with anyone. Here are some of my favorites:

1. While bbc.co.uk is located out of England, it has several content based games that range from simulations to trivia to drill-and-practice. One of the my favorite game-based simulation is The Pyramid Challenge, where you are playing the role of the head-of-state in charge of building the king’s pyramid. You need to make several decisions: location of the pyramid, what building materials to use, how many workers to employ, and so on. If you make the right decisions, your pyramid is constructed. It’s not as easy as it looks, and you learn many facts along the way. However, BBC has the best games and simulations for middle school and high school that I have seen as of yet.

2. Another site of interest is Learning Vocabulary Can Be Fun! The site has several clean, motivational games to help kids learn new vocabulary words. ESL learners can use this site to reinforce new words and practice English in a fun way.

3. Scholastic is well-known for their book orders, but they also have an extensive website of lessons and games for all subject areas and ages. While the games are advertised for Pre-K through 12, I have consistently heard from middle and high school students that the games seem too young for their classes. Check it out and be the judge.