I’ve found a web site that is a treasure trove of free online activities in areas across the entire curriculum. Actually, the link you see at the foot of this page leads to an index of Jo Edkins’ many separate educational pages.

The Tides Pools activity set includes so much material that I have broken it into two separate study units. The first unit, Tide Pools, includes Exploring Tide Pools and two supporting books. Exploring Tide Pools is set up so that students can wander through in any order, finding exciting discoveries along the way. The second unit, Tide Pools Writing And Review, includes the tests and three writing activities. Bonus: Vocabulary Cards and a Photo Collection!

Annie’s Books Online is a section of Annie’s Resource Attic which has the main and anchor books from the various activity sets in HTML format. You can see all the action in these books online by going to them from your browser, just as you would go to any other web page. This page will serve as an index to all the online activity sets and you’ll find some tips below about what’s required to use these books successfully with whichever browser you are using.

I wanted to give you a heads-up about a site that offers a chance for students to do some real science. The Quake-Catcher Network offers a chance for you and your students to actually be a part of an earthquake detection network. The web site also includes science resource downloads about earthquakes, including PDFs aimed at grades K-12.

Do you know somebody you care for so much you’d like to give them the sun, moon, and stars? Now you can! Just give them the URL to download Stellarium! It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors, but it’s totally awesome on your computer screen. There are versions for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux (the source code).

In The Animals Game, a fun science activity, students pick an animal and make the computer guess its name. It’s really a test of the student’s grasp of animal characteristics, but with a twist so that the student runs the show. Students answer questions yes or no, and the computer quickly closes in on the answer. Bonus: Clip art collection and flow chart.

Feathers is a science activity explaining how birds and people use feathers. Movies let students see close-up views of birds in flight, a diving bird, and penguins walking about on the ice. Then photos of many different feathers challenge students to guess which bird they belong to. Each feather photo leads to a page with a photo and movie of the bird. Bonus: Collection of the bird and feather photos used and a set of off-computer match cards!