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).

The Inventions activity set uses the story of the invention of Velcro® by George de Mestral to explore the process of invention and what it takes to be a successful inventor. The anchor book, How Things Get Invented, is available at two reading levels, grades 2-3 and grades 4-5. There are also comprehension tests and a Cloze Pro® activity. The final piece of the Inventions activity set are writing activities in both Classroom Suite and Clicker 5 format, entitled Could I Be An Inventor? Bonus: Vocabulary list with definitions!

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!