You Are Here - Online Activities, Resources, & Games to teach kids to be smarter consumers!

You Are Here is a cool interactive site developed and hosted by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) that offers many resources to help make kids smarter consumers.  You Are Here is broken up into 4 main sections of information:

The West Terrace - This is where students can learn about advertising techniques, suspicious claims, and more.

The Food Court - Students can learn about business competitions, monopolies, supply and demand, and more.

The Security Plaza - Students can learn about protecting their privacy and their online identity.

The East Terrace - Students can learn about online rip offs, bogus offers, and scams. 

There is even a Parents & Teachers Page with informational PDF Printouts and lots of lesson plans for each topic.




Check out You Are Here at:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/microsites/youarehere/index.html

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VectorKids - Interactive Math Games and Skill Builders for Kids!

VectorKids is a site that offers several interactivities and games to help build student skills in Mathematics (and even Social Studies too).  The site offers mostly math activities to help students with basic to intermediate math concepts. 

VectorKids skill builders include help for multiplication tables, solving for variables, division rules, addition, subtraction, counting money, geometry and even a United States Capitals Game.


The games are simple and would offer a nice extension to your classroom activities or extra help for specific students who may be struggling with these concepts.

Check out VectorKids at: http://www.vectorkids.com

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Illuminations: Resources for Teaching & Learning Mathematics!!

Illuminations is a site created by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) filled with resources, activities, games, lesson plans & interactivities to help teachers teach and students learn mathematics and math concepts.  This site has a lot of resources you could use in your classroom for students from Kindergarten to 12th Grade.

My favorites are the 107 different online activities to help make math come alive right in front of your students.  Instead of simply discussing fractions as parts of a whole, Illuminations allows students to actually see fractions visually represented and manipulate them to further understand their relationships to one another.

Illuminations also has over 600 lesson plans, all free to use, that include everything you need to implement in your classroom as soon as today (with a little planning of course). 


Check out NCTM's Illuminations at:

http://illuminations.nctm.org/
 

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Math Playground - Math Games, Word Problems, Problem Solving & Math Videos for Elementary & Middle School Students

Math Playground is a nice interactive site that was requested to me by one of my 6th Graders.  I have hundreds of sites that help students practice and review math problems and functions, but this was not one of them.

Math Playground offers children in elementary and middle school many different math interactivities and games.  Some of these games are created specifically for the site, others are embedded from other sites.  The games are really good and there seems to be many different topics and standards covered.  The site does have a few ads on it, but students are used to this.

Math Playground is a great site to help students review particular concepts you are covering in class.  It is a great resource to extend your math curriculum outside of your classroom or to allow your students to play and surpass the time when they are finished with a class project.  I have added this to my Math Resources to allow students to use the site when they are don with their work in my Computer Class.

Check out Math Playground at http://www.mathplayground.com/.

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ThatQuiz! - Quick Practice Quizzes covering many subjects and ALL grade levels!

ThatQuiz.org is a fun little site that offers various customizable quizzes covering Math, Geography, Science, & Vocabulary.  Each quiz can be customized to set the time, the level of difficulty, whether the site offers feedback, and more. 


This site offers a great opporitunity for instructors to have their students review a large variety of subject matter for different class subjects.  This site is great for "POD" or beginning of the class activities, classroom review sessions & Games, or even an activity to work on to review for a test.

I would never recommend a site like ThatQuiz.org to be used as a sole teaching tool.  This will never replace class instruction and class practice.  However, it is a great review site, time filler, or fun website students can navigate in their spare time. 


Check out thatquiz.org

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Conceptu Math - Fraction Tools: Standards Aligned Interactives & Manipulatives to Help Understand Fractions

Conceptua Math Fraction Tools are great Interactives for helping your students understand Fractions.  The site has tools to help understand fractions on a number line, add & subtract fractions, identifying fractions, estimating, equivalents, finding common denominators & more.  Not only do they have interactive tools for visualizing each concept, they also have a video for how to use each tool, common core aligned standards for the tool, lesson plans and classroom activities (with a premium membership).

We use this site in Pride Class (Homeroom) as we practice our mathematics skills for our upcomming statewide standardized test.

The site and fraction tools are free to use, but you do have to sign up for a free account to use the tools.  You can sign up for a premium account if you would like detailed lesson plans as well as student individual logins.  

I would recommend this site as a tool to use with your students as a whole class instructive tool and not as a site you have them work on individually.  Again, you would have to pay for those features and I am trying to stress on this blog tools that will not cost you any money.  Go check out Conceptua Math and their Fraction Tools and see how you can use them in your classroom curriculum.

http://www.conceptuamath.com/fractions.html

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SumDog Contests and Competitions now available for FREE accounts!

SumDog is a site that allows students to practice their numeracy skills in competitions versus other classmates or against students around the world.   Back in December, I recieved an email from Sumdog notifying me that all Competitions and Games are now available for FREE ACCOUNTS.

I setup a class on Sumdog and had a 2 week competition amongst my students.  You can even edit the "Leaderboard" to show only the top 10 student scores or your whole class.  What I thought was pretty cool was you could even have competitions against students outside of your classroom.  Some of the games even let you compete against other students within the game.

My classroom competition was only supposed to be completed OUTSIDE of my computer class.  Students were on Sumdog in Study Hall, at the public library, and at home.  At the end of the 2 weeks, I had a dozen students who had spent upwards of 14 plus hours outside of the classroom practicing their numeracy skills. 

I awarded the top 10 students with an icy cold Mountain Dew at the end of the competition.  A small price to pay to see my students practicing their math skill just 2 months outside of our big Statewide Standardized Test.


www.sumdog.com

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