“I know that” is a great site to access fun learning activities about math, the arts, social learning, science, language arts and social studies. It is also possible to access the learning activities by grade (for pre-kindergarten to grade 6). The activities are very visually attractive and user-friendly. To experience the activity, you need to open an account. You can get a free guest limited account that includes advertisement. The advertisements do not seem to target children. By subscribing to a paid account, you can eliminate the ads and have access to many premium member features. With the teacher’s paid account, you can even track the progress of your students. The site also promotes “social learning” by encouraging users to create an avatar and posting about their successes.
Archive for the Category ◊ Arts ◊
Educational Videos dot com is a site devoted to finding you the best educational videos on the web. It includes a collection of videos about arts, science, environment, geology, health, history, language, mathematics, music, psychology, sports and technology. They are only few videos available in each category right now, but the number is growing. Even though the videos are already available on YouTube and they are simply embedded on this website, they are better organized on this website for use by educators. The videos are intended for students of all ages.
If you have artistic students who like to draw faces, Mr. Picasso Head will be a great tool to let them explore their creativity. This flash application is very simple. You get to choose a face, eyes, nose, lips, ears, eyebrows and hair and you drag them and move them to give your face a unique look. Each element of the drawing can be rotated, flipped, scaled up and down, and coloured. As with any good graphic application, there are layers that can be used to decide what will be in the foreground and background.
Kideas is a great website if you are looking for ideas of for arts and craft projects. All the projects are simple and do not require complex material. In all, there are about 40 craft ideas. They all come with a pictures and a PDF giving all the material and instructions to do it.
There are also many colouring pages. For kids who prefer to be artistic with food, there is a “creative food” section. Finally, the parenting tools will be helpful for parents with tips and ideas such as how to make your own baby sling, how to prepare a weekly chore chart, a diaper and feeding chart of a homework log sheet and some lunch box notes!
The money origami website is a great resource for teachers who want step-by-step instruction for origami. The models include: Boots, Bow Tie, Butterfly, Eyeglasses, Fan, Gift Box, Picture Frame, Ring, Sailboat, Serpent, Shirt, Spider, Valentine and Xmas Tree. All the models are made from paper bills and step-by-step instructions with pictures at each step are included. It also includes links to other website containing instruction to make origami. The models also make great gifts for special occasion such as mother’s day or father’s day.
The discovery channel offers a worksheets generator on its education website. The worksheets are available in many different categories including : Arts, Mathematics, Science, Health, Social Studies, Information Technology and Foreign Language.
All worksheets were created by teachers. Worksheets are organized by category and listed by title and grade level. In each category there are many sub-categories. Each sub-category has many exercises. Worksheets include matching exercises as well as scramble exercises. They are formatted in HTML so the layout is not the best when printed.
Treble Clef and Bass Clef is a very cool program to teach your students, in a fun and easy way, how to read music notes on the staff in both treble clef and bass clef. It is a shareware, which means you can download a demo version, but you will not be able to access all the notes. You can pay a small fee to access the other notes. This program works well with Windows Vista, XP, Me, 98, 95, NT or 2000, but doesn’t work under Mac OS X. This program is part of a collection of programs to learn music through games published by Happy Note!
When the program starts, the student may choose the notes that he or she wants to practice. At first, the student can start with only two notes and gradually add more notes. It is also possible to choose the speed of the game: adagio (the slowest), moderato (average speed) and allegro (full speed). The notes appear on the staff and the student must recognize each note. He or she then needs to select the proper name of the note and then shoot a projectile on the note. If it is a miss, the projectile may come back and make him loose one live. There are also explosives that must be avoided. At full speed, the scrolling of notes and the presence of projectiles and explosives make the game very interesting and enjoyable. It is a challenge to complete each level. The student really has the impression of playing a game rather than learning notes. It is possible to either use syllabic names for notes (Do, Re, Mi, etc.) or alphabetical (A, B, C, etc.)
For some students, traditional teaching methods will simply not work because they tend to be more artistic and really have a hard time taking advantage of their artistic skills when completing assignments in mathematics, social studies, language or science. Yet, they have great academic skills in music, dance, drama and arts.
« Learning through the arts » is a great resource to help answer the need of those students. It is sponsored by the Royal Conservatory of Music and financially supported by Heritage Canada and Culture.ca. It includes complete lesson plans and student worksheets as well as ideas and videos. The author of the lesson plans were able to include the arts in various subjects including aboriginal education, French, English, health, technology, physical education, social studies, history, mathematics and science. On this picture, you can see a lesson in mathematics about fractions being taught using dance.
A very well designed search feature will help you find appropriate lesson plans by entering criteria such as subject, region, artform and type. Lesson plans can be found in both English and French.
