Breathe New Life Into Your Lessons

Edudemic has compiled a fabulous list of 15 websites that will inspire you as an educator, taking the exhausting task of searching for valuable content off your plate. Organized by subjects--language arts, math, and the arts--you'll find just what you need to add breathe new life into your lessons next fall. All are trustworthy sites with creative lessons, ideas, and resources. Check them out!

Calling All Science Teachers--Common Core Lesson Plan Round-Up!

When you're thinking through the best ways of engaging your students, communicating and reinforcing concepts, helping them achieve mastery of new ideas and ways of thinking, and just plain getting excited about learning, it can help to have a little inspiration. Seeing what other teachers have done to develop creative, CCSS-aligned lesson plans, or looking through resource libraries to find interesting lesson plans can give your own planning an energy boost.

Here's a round-up of some websites that provide science teachers with CCSS-aligned ideas for the classroom. Look for other subjects/disciplines in future posts!

Check out these FREE SCIENCE LESSONS from AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). You can filter your search by grade and content to find what you want more easily!

Who doesn't love cookies? This series of blog posts by science writer Bethany Brookshire is called COOKIE SCIENCE! She takes educators and students step-by-step through applied science, all in the name of finding cookies that taste better. If you're looking for student-friendly science news, don't miss the website, hosted by Society for Science & the Public.

MIT BLOSSOMS is a wonderful website with a focus on videos for classroom use. You can do a very focused search, including by content standard, and locate science video lessons--each of which is a complete resource, with teacher's guide and supporting materials. CLICK HERE to search by education standards!


Got students who are into sports? Then GO HERE to the Connect A Million Minds website to find science-friendly learning activities and games for kids. These would make great additions to lesson-plans.

Engineering and applied science lessons are free and searchable on TeachEngineering.org! You can browse across multiple categories or search by content standard. There are hands-on activities, lessons, and supporting materials!

For a big-picture look at how real science educators are making CCSS work in their classrooms, check out this Edutopia.org blog post, "Common Core in Action: How Two Science Teachers Are Implementing Common Core." Get tips, ideas, and best practices!

Finally, take a look at the Utah Education Network. They have easy-to-browse, free lesson plans that are aligned to Utah's Core (based on CCSS). CLICK HERE for K-6 science lessons. CLICK HERE for 7-12 science lessons!

Who Knew Science Could be Tasty?! Food Chemistry and Cooking!

Whether you're looking for fun educational activities for your own kids as the summer winds down, or whether you're interested in finding ways to integrate exciting, hands-on learning into your science lessons in the coming school year, CHECK OUT THESE ACTIVITIES from PBS Learning Media, collected here on the KQED Website.

Building and using solar cookers to cook s'mores and explore sustainable energy... Learning to read labels and understand how to make healthy choices... Exploring cheesemaking to get a better grasp of biological processes... Digging into the anthropology of food practices and holiday food rituals... Even learning about the chemical compounds in onions that make us cry!

There's plenty of fun--and learning--to be found here, so take a look and get excited about the science of food!

Choosing Texts for ELA CCSS

The Common Core State Standards for ELA are in part designed to help students become engaged, critical, interactive readers and interpreters of texts and information. As students grow into more capable readers and learn new strategies for engaging with texts and resource materials, educators can select texts with increasing levels of complexity to challenge their students and motivate them to move forward. Many teachers have questions about how to make these text selections, and how to find texts that are aligned
with the CCSS.

Achievethecore.org has a toolbox of resources for teachers to help them better understand what goes into text selection, and how to choose texts and reading materials that align with the expectations for text complexity set by the CCSS for each grade level.

CHECK OUT THEIR TEXT COMPLEXITY PAGE to find resources for measuring text complexity, finding texts, lesson planning from text complexity, and more.

Free Lesson Plans From Smithsonian Education!

Whether you've been to Washington, D.C. or not, no doubt you know about the amazing museums and research centers of the Smithsonian Institution. But did you know that they have a website just for educators, with links to online resources, lesson plans and curriculum guides, and access to some of the museum's exhibits and collections?

Take a look HERE to find their educator homepage, where you can browse to see what they have on offer! And be sure not to miss THIS LIST of lesson plans--they're easy to search by keyword, by standard, by subject and by grade, so finding resources that you can use right away is incredibly user-friendly and easy! The search fields are to the left.

Finally, be sure to check out their Resource Library and their list of Online Events, where you can see how to incorporate museum collections and artifacts into your classroom lessons, and access supporting podcasts and webcasts for free!

Watch Math Coach Audra McPhillips Teach a Great Common Core Aligned Math Lesson!

Audra McPhillips is a math coach in Rhode Island. In this video for The Teaching Channel, she works with middle school students on understanding how functions operate. McPhillips believes that students in this age group can be engaged in grasping not only lessons and concepts, but also in seeing the way those connect with the standards themselves.

If you create a free account with The Teaching Channel, you'll be able to access all the supporting materials for this lesson--including the lesson plan. Stick around the website to check out a host of other great tutorials and videos.

Finding the Right Math Content for your Common Core Aligned Lessons!

The good news is that there are already thousands of great resources to be found online for math teachers who want to create fantastic lessons that are aligned to CCSS. The bad news is that there are thousands of great resources out there! How should you sort, sift, and dig through them all to find the resources and lesson ideas that are exactly right for your students and your classroom?

Check out ck12.org, a website run by the CK-12 Foundation, a non-profit committed to creating and aggregating top-quality STEM content. They have developed a Common Core Math Standards browsing tool that allows teachers to browse the standards and find aligned concepts, and then mine free, vetted resources to build out lesson plans for those concepts.

It may take a bit of practice to get comfortable with the tool, but it's a powerful resource that can help teachers find exactly the content they want to teach!

CLICK HERE TO TAKE A LOOK!

Over 300,000 Teacher-Created, Teacher-Vetted Resources--FREE!

Sharemylesson.com is a website that brings educators together to share their winning classroom and professional development resources with each other.

Intended to inspire and facilitate collaboration among teachers, this site includes an enormous number of Common Core-aligned lesson plans and resources, all of which you can access for free.

Searching can be a little bit of a challenge, but there are a few short, easy-to-follow tutorial videos on the homepage that will help you learn to navigate the site. And it's worth it! The site includes a Common Core hub, with news, information, updates, and forums to help you as prepare for the move to CCSS.

CHECK IT OUT HERE!

Common Core: Getting a Handle on Resources, Info, Ideas, and Assessments

There is so much out there right now about Common Core State Standards--from heated debates and misinformation to fantastic new resources to help teachers prepare for the transition. But how do you know where to look for solid information and vetted resources? It can be more than a little overwhelming trying to sort through everything out there, especially if you're a busy teacher with a full schedule already.

Help is here! Check out this great Common Core roundup from Edutopia.org! Whether you're looking to get a handle on the debates about CCSS, or learn more about implementation on the ground in schools, or find out more about how the standards were developed and the research behind them, or even get a better grip on assessments and lesson plans aligned to the Common Core, this website offers tons of organized, useful, curated links. CHECK IT OUT HERE!

Digital Learning Activities and Educational Games -- Free!

As every teacher knows, not all educational games are created equal! Some have genuine value and can serve as wonderful reinforcements for student learning, or can expand student learning beyond the classroom. Yet how do you find educational games and digital learning activities that have been vetted and curated without spending hours of your own time testing them, or paying for memberships?

Check out this fantastic website: Powermylearning.org! It's a free digital learning platform with resources for teachers, students, and parents alike, and was developed by the well-respected national education nonprofit CFY. If you're looking for games, videos, interactives, and other digital resources to incorporate into your Common Core lesson plans for the classroom, then this is the website for you.

Each resource in Math and ELA is aligned directly to a Common Core standard. Plus, there are countless resources for science, social studies, the arts, technology and more. You'll need to create an account to access all the material on the site, but once you do, you'll be able to tap into hundreds of carefully-vetted, free digital resources.

Unpacking Common Core State Standards: ELA

Without a doubt, if you're a teacher in a Common Core state, you're already aligning your instruction to the Common Core, and have been thinking about ways to implement new lesson plans, formative assessments, and other fantastic strategies for meeting your students' needs.

But sometimes it can be helpful to get back to the basics before you start the new school year, and reinforce your understanding of the standards in your area. This free resource from LearnZillion shows you three simple steps to understanding Common Core ELA standards. It also includes links to other helpful resources, and can serve as an introduction to the standards for those who may not have worked with them yet, or as a refresher for teachers who are planning for the next year.

CLICK HERE to check out the website. And by the way--if you create a user profile with LearnZillion, you can access a list of webinars, lesson plans, and other great, free, resources!