Exploratorium: the museum of science, art and human perception

Based in San Francisco, the Exploratorium was founded by the famous physicist and educator Dr Frank Oppenheiner, who remained the director until his death in 1985.

I’ll be visiting the site again, and again and probably again; it’s got to great stuff on there.

However, today I’m interested in the After School section, which “brings hands on activities and digital library resources into afterschool play”.

There are well presented instructional videos telling you how to create the activity, how to engage children in the activity, and how to vary things and investigate the results.

Atoms

What about having a representation of any atom in the Periodic Table, showing the spin of the electrons in the shells. Something like this:

Site link.

abc teach

I came across this excellent site called abcteach. It is nicely categories and has so many worksheets for printing, lots of tools for handwriting, letter/word sorting, word searches, spelling, sudoku. For slightly older children there are maths and science, reading, writing, thinking skills, logic puzzles, and much more. I’d suggest having a good look around.

Learn your countries

Here are some online games and logic puzzles that can help you with a bit of geography.

Thanks to Paul Wigfield for pointing me towards Sporcle. It has lots of puzzles to test yourself against the clock. I’ll be returning to it in the future. Here I’m interested in the one’s to help with learning about countries and geography. For example, you can name the countries in Europe

Countries of the World

US States

In a similar way you can use the Lufthansa virtual pilot game to test your knowledge of European city locations against the clock.

How things work – Science videos

I came across these videos when I was looking out how a trebuchet works (as I mentioned previously). These are a series of videos on YouTube presented by “Steve Jones an experienced mathematics and science teacher”. As you can see from the screenshot they cover nuclear energy, Richter scale, electricity generators, and a few others.

Hilaroad – science, engineering, electronic projects

I came across this site accidentally (whilst investigating trebuchets I clicked a link and ended up there), and boy am I glad I did. The site is called Hilaroad.com and has lots of projects to try, with instructions and video. It look very good.

Cranium Cariboo Board Game

Cariboo is one of the board games from the Cranium stable. It is interesting and engaging for younger kids. It helps to develop colour, shape and number recognition with the basic set of cards, and numbers and letters with the advanced cards.

This video explains the game:

Logical games

Disney has some great online minigames. Some of which really get your youngsters brains working to figure out the logic to solve the puzzles. Three I’d suggest are:

• Motion Potion, where you have to figure out the correct routes for the chemical mixtures,
• Tarzan Coconut Run, where you work out where to place the components to direct the thrown coconut,
• Mickey Robot Roundup, where you have to work out the route; placing the arrows, balloons and umbrellas on the floor to direct the robot Mickey around the obstacles in the correct order to exit the level.

Maths videos via Tutor-USA

Tutor-USA is split into four sections (three of them currently active). It focuses on Maths. The Worksheets section has a collection of worksheets for access, provided you login. With the Math Tutoring section you can get access to maths tutors online. However, the section that particularly interested me was the Video Lessons, has embedded videos split down into separate sections, including Basic Math, Pre-Algebra, Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Prob & Stats, and Calculus.

There are also some good online maths games available:

Then there are lesson plans available. A set of maths tools and calculators, including quadratic equation solver, fraction calculator, and the like.

Music Lesson – Learning to play piano

These sites might be of interest if you are wanting to learn how to play the piano.

Zebra keys has 50 lessons of various difficulties aimed at children 13 and over or parents wanting to help their children learn. It has flash animations showing video and sound to help you along.

PianoNanny is a well written explanatory site guiding you through from the initial principles of learning to play. It covers starter, intermediate and advanced studies.