WVSKPhillips Domain

Which country lets you visit both cities of Edinborough and Glasgow? Where can you see stalactites?

Remember these questions from the wonderful folks over at BrainQuest? Those  marvelous flip books which kept thousands of us entertained on the road and we now are trying to get our own children interested in learning various tidbits in the hopes of landing a Jeopardy slot someday.

Now, even better, these books are available for free over at Scribd! Scribd is a free place provided by Google to allow us to jot something down and publish it. In a nutshell it is “largest social publishing company in the world — the website where more than 60 million people each month discover and share original writings and documents.” (See here)

You can browse for items to read and even save them to a “reading list”.

I think this would also be a great activity for Smart Boards and allowing the students to take charge of the activity.

So – do you know which has the most gravity: a supernova, a white dwarf, or a black hole?

Wow – here I was – taking a quick break from writing lesson plans for the week – just foolin’ and toolin’ around and look at what I stumbled across….Newtools!

Click on the “click here” button to see new possibilities. My thoughts for this in my classroom would be to use this when kids need a break from the usual routine, when things are getting stale, on early out days and class periods are short, and so on. Once you see how it works, you could also make your own options with your own curriculum and choices for how/what type activities and let kids draw from a hat. Then give them 20 or so minutes to get set, do whatever researching they need to do, practice, and then have them hit the stage! This would be lots of fun and the kids may not even realize they are learning as well as doing a little teaching.