Last Week of School and my Sanity

I teach music at my school so I am in the crazies of December with a Christmas program coming up. We were supposed to have it last Tuesday (Dec 10th) but with the icy weather we moved it to Monday (Dec 16th). So I have been trying to keep my sanity while doing the last bit of rehearsals, etc for the program. However, I do have classes that are not in the program so what to do with them? Well I had some of them bring their netbooks to class and I showed them my favorite Christmas fun things to do. Here is a short list of my favorites:

 Make-a-Flake - definitely one of my favorites. Do you know how many kids do NOT know how to cut out a paper snowflake? It really is sad. This is a virtual one but you can save the image, send it, share it and you can probably create fancier snowflakes than you could in real life. Very fun to see what your "cuts" will create. (and not paper scraps on the floor!) This would be a fun activity to do with students and then make the actual paper ones. I actually like to do "snow" activities in January since there are plenty of Christmas things to do in December. And in Texas we tend to get our actual snow in January or February.

Virtual Cookies? Here are two sites.
Old Fashioned Christmas from Theoworlds.com. I like the simplicity of this one. You can email it, get the link, get the code to embed but there is not an easy way to exit and go to the beginning other than to reload the page. Still fun.

Get your own! | More Flash Toys from TheoWorlds.com

From Sprint there is SprintSweets and the Gingerbread Man with Everything. Save it, share it, send it. Decorate with icing and candies. Easy to start over but you can't just undo a step. It is all the way back to the beginning if you mess up and want to fix it. I do like how he is on the little cookie sheet though! Cute!

Decorate a Christmas Tree Cute, simple drag and drop, can add snowfall. Save or print image. This does have ads though (boo!). The way this image comes out you could photo edit and add your own message on the right side of the tree.

Christmas Tree I like this one. No ads. Simple drag and drop. No save or share but you could snip it. Turn off the lights and the fireplace and tree glow. Nice for the Smart Board. Reload page to do again. 

From Castle Arcana there are other links like Build a Snowman, Musical Christmas Tree, or how about The Christmas Carol for Guinea Pigs. Okay, maybe not?

One hint to searching for fun to do on the Smart Board is to search with the word "interactive". You will find more that will work on your interactive whiteboard. There are lots of Smart Board lessons for Christmas fun also out there. You won't be at a loss for things to do during this last week before the Christmas break.

Have fun!

Science Fair

I missed November.....Can we just pretend Dec 1st is really just November 31st in disguise? Yeah- probably not. It's been a busy month. Ok moving on...

Science Fair is coming up and your kiddos probably are already (or should be) working on their projects. Project should have been picked at the the beginning of the year because there are some that might take a few months to investigate. I thought I would poke around the web looking for tools to help with those projects. And remember parents- it's not your project.

There are plenty of sites out there for science fair project ideas but here are a few I found interesting:

Science Buddies Awesome site!
As a student I can take a survey that will help me decide on an area of interest for my project. I love the first question in the survey "When is the project due?". Too many don't realize the time involved in a good project. The following questions are grade level, did your teacher assign a particular area of science or are you free to choose and then what is your reading level. I went with these answers: due: more than a month, area: free to choose, grade level: 7, and reading level: average. After clicking continue it gave me a list of 26 questions that ranged from if I liked plants, the space program, working with batteries to have I ever worked with computer codes on a project not required by my teacher. I now have 586 recommendations! I went back and re-evaluated my "sometimes" answers and now I have 583. As a student I don't see myself going through all of these so I need to narrow the list a bit. If I choose an area of science, like Earth Science, I now have 61 suggestions, a more manageable list. I can go through the list and select favorites to help narrow even further. Once a project is selected you are shown a complete description of the project including time requirement, cost, difficulty. You are also given background, materials, procedure, how to make it your own, help and resources to learn more. I could go on and on about this site. It really is an excellent site for anyone interested in science or to encourage someone to consider science. TEACHERS: the section for teachers offers lots of downloadables, including rubrics for all steps of the project. Create a free account to access some of them. If you teach science definitely go visit Science Buddies.

Discovery Education collaborated with Scotch brand products offer a nice
Science Fair Central. It has a neat little widget that will help you choose a project. No personal survey here but it will lead you through some ideas. However there is also an Idea Finder that will give you more detail and choices.
There are resources for parents and the science fair coordinator. You can find a sample judges scoring sheet as well. You do not need a Discovery Education account to access all of this. I love anything from Discovery Education because you can count on the credibility of the material.

Some others to peruse:
Science Fair Project Resource Guide - contains many good links to other resources.


Need to create a graph? Create a Graph make bar, line, area, pie and XY. Easy to use.

Online Chart Tool - no account needed to create and save

Timelines? Try these:

Class Tools Timeline

Timeline Maker from SoftSchools.com- can have up to 12 events- other good resources here also

Mathematical and Scientific Symbols

Science Images- FREE images, photos, sketches, diagrams- free to print or download

Science A-Z also has "printable and projectable" science diagrams. Be sure to check out their other resources also

Hopefully this is a list of sites that might be helpful to anyone involved in Science Fairs. Once I started looking there are many to be found.