Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

Here you will find the most extensive list of homonyms ever seen! Download this PDF list of over 460 homonyms (words that sound alike but have a different spelling and meaning) organized for us by Alan Cooper. If you've exhausted your list of homonyms to use with your students, check this site out. If you're still confused by which witch is which, use this site to cite the correct word!

tag(s): editing (90), homonyms (8), spelling (93), word choice (14), word study (57)

The goal of this site is to demonstrate the beauty of mathematics. The creator also wants to show the wonder and intellectual playfulness of math. Included on the site are many videos and essays exploring higher level mathematics. Titles include "How to Think Like a School Math Genius", "A Cute Finger Trick for Trigonometry", and "What is Zero to the Zeroth Power?". Most video titles are approximately 10 minutes in length. Also available on the site are two free PDF downloads: Guide to Everything Quadratic and Guide to Fractions. Be aware: parts of this site require some navigation (a few clicks) to get to your destination. But the "clicks" are well worth the time. At the time of this review, the link to "Curriculum Tidbits" was not active, but the Think Curriculum tab works. Although the author's books are available for sale on the site, there is plenty of free material available making the site worth exploring.
This site includes advertising.

tag(s): critical thinking (108), fractions (160), gifted (62), prime numbers (25), probability (96), puzzles (143), video (252)

Learn a new language through music and lyrics! Choose English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portugese, Japanese, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Danish, or Romanian. Register for FREE and learn the new language. Each language has different activities: karaoke, interactive cloze activities, videos, and more. You can choose among three different difficulty levels. Some activities even have the option to "double click" to read a definition of a word. You also have the ability to submit your own songs and language activities to the site. Note that this site is fairly new and only ha a few hundred songs at the time of this review. Help contribute to the offerings!
This site includes advertising.

tag(s): cross cultural understanding (151), cultures (128), french (72), german (48), greek (33), italian (28), japanese (47), portuguese (22), russian (24), songs (42), spanish (102)

Math Video Tutorials offers 5,000 free math videos organized by course and topic. And the offerings are constantly growing. Videos are hosted on YouTube and SchoolTube and are all 10 minutes or less in length. Content includes arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, business calculus, and calculus. Each main topic includes links to the videos organized by more specific topics - for example, algebra videos are sorted by an introduction to algebra, rational expressions, equations and functions, equations and percentages, exponential and logarithmic functions, graphing, linear equations, and more. If your district blocks YouTube, the videos may not be viewable.

tag(s): area (51), business (48), charts and graphs (166), equations (116), factoring (25), functions (53), integers (21), measurement (125), operations (74), order of operations (28), percent (59), place value (34), prime numbers (25), ratios (48), test prep (68), tutorials (47), volume (33)

This site offers several interesting interactives for practicing math concepts at the elementary level. Many games go beyond the standard rote-type practice and involve critical thinking skills. For example, Beads on a String asks you to create a bead necklace using a pattern, but then asks that bead number 102 be blue adding difficulty to the challenge. Other activities involve estimation, money, logic, and symmetry. Activities can be sorted by age (5-12). Parts of this site appear in Dutch and you may have to simply hit the "translate" button to see the instruction in English.

tag(s): critical thinking (108), estimation (34), logic (162), money (118), puzzles (143), symmetry (28), time (92)