The new Early Learning section is up and sorta running! We hope this will be the start of something good!
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Added some really fine and diverse new sites over the past 10 days or so. Latest was Teach the Children Well which is much like this site in mission. IMO their lists of sites are huge, really diverse, and very useful. You should bookmark the site and refer to it often. Sometimes this site is more specific than ours, which may be a good thing. You can get into a rut. If you see a site that is almost embarrassingly more efficient than your own, you should probably borrow from their ideas. There are some things about their layout we here ought to study, and maybe profit thereby, but not their backgrounds or the long chain of links on down the main page.
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OK, we're back after an absence. Aargh! AmericaZoo, with its list of 425 mammals etc., is gone! Go to the site URL and you get the seemingly ubiquitous dummy site featuring The Blonde With The Backpack! Train your kids to immediately click the back button when they see this person!
Fortunately, we've found a suitable substitute site in WhoZoo from Texas Wesleyan U. We do hope The Blonde doesn't take them over, too!
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If you can find a copy of Treasure Mathstorm, at Amazon, on EBay, a garage sale, wherever - get it! It's still one of the very best math games ever!
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The H1N1 virus continues to spread like wildfire. Therefore, we'll keep our four flu and hand washing sites at the top of our list. Wash your hands, cough into your elbow, and disinfect surfaces several times a day. If your local situation warrants, wear a mask.
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Had to de-link Atlapedia, an atlas site in our Maps section. When you go into their site, a separate bogus page comes up and tries to lure you into something bad - a malware download, perhaps, or a virus. Anyway, we won't link to them anymore until their problem is fixed.
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Just finished reading Diane Ravitch's piece in The Boston Globe online. "Critical thinking? You need knowledge By Diane Ravitch | September 15, 2009" Go read it, she's on to something. If it weren't copyrighted we'd print it here! Basically, there's always been a branch of the American education establishment that is anti-academic, BUT - critical thinking ain 't worth jack if you do not have a decent education to base it upon*. Just go read the article, it's worth it.
* yes, yes, we all know you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition.
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We've put four health sites that deal with flu and hand washing at the top of the list on the index page, for your convenience. We suggest you use them. H1N1 is dangerous for kids and young adults. On a totally different subject, also re: prevention - keep Windows updated. You should be using at least Internet Explorer 7 by now, and IE 8 is better. Get rid of Internet Explorer 6!!!! It is dangerous for your computer and for other computers all over the internet! It's a virus magnet!! You must also keep Windows updated. Go to Tools and click Windows Update. We like to select Custom 'cause nobody wants .net around here, but most people choose Express. Follow the directions.
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Yes we have contributors. Lots of people email us with suggested sites, usually theirs but not always. Some we add to Good Sites. They all get looked at first, never fear. The majority of those we do not add are commercial sites. We'll only add commercial sites if they really meet a need. Starfall, BrainPop, and Tumblebooks are examples. There are no substitutes for those excellent sites. Enchanted Learning isn't really commercial, they just have subscription goodies to stay afloat on the web. We love that site, and subscribe to it in our other lives as working teachers.
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College Preparatory Math: This outfit is taking over US public school math programs like wildfire. Teachers and parents can google "CPM" to get a fair and balanced idea of why so many educators and other parents are unimpressed. Our own opinion is that students need a firm grounding in the fundamentals (for example, knowing their math facts/times tables/terminology) before venturing into group learning and constructivism. Maybe CPM is right for your kids. If you think it's not, and your school district is already doing it, you'll have to transfer your kids or homeschool them. Our math section still has, and will always have, links to very many traditional math drill and practice sites. All we know is we are tired of kids who do not know times tables or principles of basic algebra and geometry. What's wrong with knowing your times tables, or using fractions? Why should it have to even BE justified? All this is just our own personal opinion, and a reasonable adult may well have another, differing opinion. (That'll satisfy the lawyers.)
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6/22 We've been accumulating a good sized list of sites to look at over the weekend, just haven't had time to examine them in depth. More new sites are on the way!
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Added several new sites plus a free widget from http://www.addtoany.com "Help your visitors share, save and subscribe to your content with AddToAny widgets — try them!" We all hope it'll help any of our readers who'd like to share us with their social sites.
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Added seven new "good sites" today! "Castillo's Corner" posted today June 6 09, is in a font not seen here before, Futura Lite BT. "Corner" in Verdana looks like "Comer" to one contributor. So, we experimented with a new font! "Comer" en Espanol = "to eat."
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The World War II links were on the front page this week because they both were pivotal events in world history and thus affect us all. Midway stopped the expansion of the then-Japanese government which planned to conquer Australia, India, New Zealand and the USA up to the Rocky Mountains. D-Day opened the Second Front, took some of the Nazi pressure off the amazingly tough but hard-pressed Red Army, and shortened the war in general. Both actions were incredible gambles by the two Americans who led the two Allied forces.* Both were victories, despite terrible Allied losses.
* There were a few Royal Netherlands Navy patrol bombers at Midway. They didn't have to be there but they stepped up to help the US Navy. They did their part. There was at least one serving officer of the Royal Navy present at Midway, a "leftenant" serving aboard the aircraft carrier Yorktown (CV-5). He did his part, too.
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Here we are again - finally got a search engine put up. Went with Google and it really works.
With spring coming on strong in the northern hemisphere, and school soon closing for the summer, the urge for kids and the rest of us to get outside and be active in the sunshine grows daily. Along with the need for exercising the body comes the need to keep learning over the summer. Kids usually forget much of what they learned in school and so teachers have to spend the first months of school every fall reteaching. Have your kids keep hitting the good sites over the summer and keep that learning fresh.
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Since this site started, it has featured a small Holidays page, which also has some games. We keep the Holiday section because holidays are so much a part of the elementary school experience. We do not have a games sites listing as such, because the kids already know where all the cool game sites are, their mental list is ever changing based on what their peers think is popular, and it was never our intention to be a games portal.
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A Blog in Spite of Itself?
Our long descriptions of sites may have some blog-like characteristics. We've pretty much decided to keep it that way. Lots of sites have lists of links for you, without any description, so you have to guess by title if the site's any good. We try to help you there. We like to help you with descriptions of sites we post.
Also, we are all well aware of many good sites out there that are subscription, so you must pay to access content. We avoid listing pay sites unless they would be the sole source to fill some vital need. BrainPop is an example.
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Finally acquired rights to .com! So now you can go to goodsitesforkids.com and get the same site as good old goodsitesforkids.org!
We added Guide to Grammar and Writing from Capital Community College, Hartford, Connecticut recently, along with two sites about diagramming sentences. People "of a certain age" remember when everybody had to do this in grade school. It's out of fashion now, to the point where anyone under 40 probably never did this. Like Latin, it's coming back in style in the educational community. Benefits include better understanding of sentence structure, better parsing, better writing overall, and better public speaking.
The following was borrowed from Capital Community College's grammar site:
What Diagramming Teaches Us
When Joseph R. Mallon Jr. bumps up against a complex problem, he thinks back to a lesson he learned in high school from the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception.
The Philadelphia-area school's Catholic nuns taught him the art of diagramming a sentence. Once all the parts of speech lined up, Mallon pulled clarity from the chaos. It's a process he uses today to tackle tough issues as chief executive and chairman of Measurement Specialties Inc.
"Sit down quietly. Take (the issue) apart into its component parts. Make sure all the components fit together well. They've got to be well chosen, fit together and make sense. There are few (business) problems that can't be solved that way, as dire as it might seem," Mallon said. "Sentence diagramming is one of the best analytical techniques I ever learned."
Investor's Business Daily
17 October 2000
The purpose of this site is to help you, whether you are a teacher, a parent, a homeschooling parent/teacher, or some other interested party who is looking for good sites to help a child’s education. When it comes to finding good sites for education, we try to provide links to the best sites we can find.
This site started out as a way for busy teachers to access good quality, useful internet sites for classroom curriculum use. This site is designed to help:
In the school system where we taught, elementary computer teachers were part time and covered two or three schools during the week. Eventually, the elementary computer positions were eliminated! There was a need for a simply made web page, that even primary kids could use, that would quickly take them to whatever site their teacher directed them.
What we did was to find as many good math and language arts sites as we could and simply list them as links. Later, science, social studies, selected games, and general interest sites were added by teacher request. Still later, it was all organized and alphabetized, as the list grew ever longer.
We wanted to keep the site easy to use but also wished to add other features and sections for a larger audience, such as teachers looking for lesson plans or just for curriculum ideas. Now that the site is "public", we welcome parents and kids at home, including homeschoolers and unschoolers.
Since this site is basically a list of links, we are sensitive to broken links, sites that do not want to be linked to, sites that change so as to lose their value, and new sites that should be listed. We really try to monitor listed sites; however, we are not, nor can we be, responsible for the content of other sites.
Many of the sites listed are interactive and require Flash, Shockwave, or QuickTime to work at their best. Such sites will not work with antique Macs running less than OS 9.2 (itself an antique.) Also, iMacs running less than OSX usually need their (older) Shockwave to be reinstalled periodically. It can't be helped. Our own site looks pretty plain on older Macs, though we do our best. Windows 98 (antique) and XP should have no problems. If you have newer machines running Vista, or the Apple "big cats," great! So far, our site seems to work on all browsers we have tried - Firefox 3.5, IE 8, Chrome, and Safari.
We include sites that let you download software. Downloads posted here must be free for your use, even if some have options to upgrade or subscribe.
Why is the site so simply laid out? You could make it look more professional!
It's made so five year olds with no computer experience at all can use it. If they can use it with no worries, then older students can use it too. Oh, yeah, we actually do computer lab with five year olds! And 18 year olds. And all ages between.
This site gets worked on after work and on weekends. Thoughts? Email us.
(here's some extra site pix - American Brittanies Rule!)
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