Child-Led, Hands-On, Active Learning for Kids including:
Math
Reading
Writing
Sports and Recreation
Colors
Multilingual Teaching Tips (lots of Chinese resources)
Excellent Interactive Lessons AND Assessments for All Levels of Math for Teachers and Students
CK-12 Physical Science for Middle School FlexBook® covers core physical science concepts and includes SIMs, PLIX, real world examples, and videos.
This is an extremely comprehensive unit on Physical Science (covering the Electricity outcomes for Grade 6). Some of the chapters are not aligned directly with grade 6 outcomes, but have the potential to be used for enrichment activities. In addition to what is listed above, this resource also includes online practice quizzes for students. Teachers can download printable versions of the quizzes, along with an answer key.
*You will have to sign up to ck12.org to access everything, but it is completely free!
CK-12 Life Science for Middle School FlexBook® covers core life science concepts and includes real world examples, videos, and PLIX (which stands for Play, Learn, Interact, and eXplore—offers learners an interactive and immersive experience exploring concepts).
ck12.org
This is an extremely comprehensive unit on Diversity and Living Things. Some of the chapters are not aligned directly with grade 6 outcomes, but have the potential to be used for enrichment activities. In addition to what is listed above, this resource also includes online practice quizzes for students. Teachers can download printable versions of the quizzes, along with an answer key.
*You will have to sign up to ck12.org to access everything, but it is completely free!
CK-12 Foundation gives access to high quality educational materials for K-12 students all over the world.
They have high-quality, standards-aligned, open content in the STEM subjects.
This is an OUTSTANDING resource. Be sure to check out the Math & Science FlexLets
Students - select "switch to student version" from the top menu.
CK-12 offers a flexible and engaging platform with interactive lessons, practice exercises, and multimedia content tailored to different learning styles. The Flexi feature allows students to customize their learning experience, focusing on areas where they need support or want to explore further. This adaptability helps students take control of their education and succeed at their own pace.
Be sure to check out FlexBooks as well!
This tutorial walks you through how to customize your own interactive textbook using CK12 materials.
This is a collection of ideas for classroom discussion to get EVERYONE involved!
Strategies include:
Quiz, quiz, Trade
Opinion Poll
Stepladder
Gogomo
World Cafe
Brainwriting
Thinking Hats
Tug of War
"With its reliable news in 10-minute video segments, CNN 10 allows teachers to keep students abreast of current events without overwhelming them with extra information or commentary. CNN 10 can be used as a starting point for a variety of activities. For instance, post a discussion question of the day related to a news topic and ask students to talk in small groups about how the story affects them. Ask students to choose a story of interest and probe into it for more depth. Flip the classroom by having students watch selected videos at home, and facilitate related projects in class. Promote collaboration and creativity by having students create their own news broadcasts related to curricular goals. Finally, promote media literacy by having students compare CNN's coverage with other media coverage of the same stories.
CNN 10 offers limited supports for classroom use: broadcast transcripts and downloadable weekly quiz questions, all targeted to the topics. But students can go to the top of the screen to get to more adult articles and topics, so beware. Still, that shouldn't deter kids who want to use the site independently or parents who want to help their kids learn what's going on in the world; the materials are user-friendly enough for everyone." (Common Sense Media)
Students use washable paints, markers, and construction paper to illustrate a month from the traditional Cree Calendar
Students will be able to:
illustrate a month from the traditional Cree calendar;
demonstrate an understanding of the changes, cycles and patterns that occur in nature through words and images;
draw/paint geometric and organic shapes;
create the illusion of depth in space using size;
connect personal life experiences to their artworks.
This is an assessment activity for the The Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) educational kit. Learners will make a poster that explains possible origins of cosmic rays, how they affect people, and what protects us here on Earth. Alternately, they will make a poster describing CRaTER‰Ûªs goal and how it works.
In this lesson, students go further into the collection and interpretation of data, including cleaning and visualizing data. Students first look at the how presenting data in different ways can help people to understand it better, and they then create visualizations of their own data. Using a the results of a preferred pizza topping survey, students must decide what to do with data that does not easily fit into the visualization scheme that they have chosen. Finally, students look at which parts of this process can be automated by a computer and which need a human to make decisions.
In this lesson students get practice making decisions with data based on some problems designed to be familiar to middle school students. Students work in groups discussing how they would use the data presented to make a decision before the class discusses their final choices. Not all questions have right answers and in some cases students can and should decide that they should collect more data. The lesson concludes with a discussion of how different people could draw different conclusions from the same data, or how collecting different data might have affected the decisions they made.
Students begin the lesson by looking at a cake preference survey that allows respondents to specify both a cake and an icing flavor. They discuss how knowing the relationship between cake and icing preference helps them better decide which combination to recommend. They are then introduced to cross tabulation, which allows them to graph relationships to different preferences. They use this technique to find relationships in a preference survey, then brainstorm the different types of problems that this process could help solve.
In this lesson students look at a simple example of how a computer could be used to complete the decision making step of the data problem solving process. Students are given the task of creating an algorithm that could suggest a vacation spot. Students then create rules, or an algorithm, that a computer could use to make this decision automatically. Students share their rules and what choices their rules would make with the class data. They then use their rules on data from their classmates to test whether their rules would make the same decision that a person would. The lesson concludes with a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of using computers to automate the data problem solving process.
To conclude this unit, students design a recommendation engine based on data that they collect and analyze from their classmates. After looking at an example of a recommendation app, students follow a project guide to complete this multi-day activity. In the first several steps, students choose what choice they want to help the user to make, what data they need to give the recommendation, create a survey, and collect information about their classmates' choices. They then interpret the data and use what they have learned to create the recommendation algorithm. Last, they use their algorithms to make recommendations to a few classmates. Students perform a peer review and make any necessary updates to their projects before preparing a presentation to the class.
In this lesson, students look at how data is collected and used by organizations to solve problems in the real world. The lesson begins with a quick review of the data problem solving process they explored in the last lesson. Then students are presented three scenarios that could be solved using data and brainstorm the types of data they would want to solve them and how they could collect the data. Each problem is designed to reflect a real-world service that exists. After brainstorming, students watch a video about a real-world service and record notes about what data is collected by the real-world service and how it is used. At the end of the lesson, students record whether data was provided actively by a user, was recorded passively, or is collected by sensors.
In the first lesson of the data unit, students get an overview of what data is and how it is used to solve problems. Students start off with a brief discussion to come to a common understanding of data. They then split into groups and use a data set to make a series of meal recommendations for people with various criteria. Each group has the choices of meal represented in a different way (pictures, recipes, menu, nutrition) that gives an advantage for one of the recommendations. Afterwards, groups compare their responses and discuss how the different representations of the meal data affected how the students were able to solve the different problems.
In this lesson students create their own system for representing information. They begin by brainstorming all the different systems they already use to represent yes-no responses. They then work in small groups to create a system that can represent any letter in the alphabet using only a single stack of cards. The cards used have one of 6 different possible drawings (6 animals, 6 colors, etc.) and so to represent the entire alphabet students will need to use patterns of multiple cards to represent each letter. Students create messages with their systems and exchange with other groups to ensure the system worked as intended. In the wrap-up discussion the class reviews any pros and cons of the different systems. They discuss commonalities between working systems and recognize that there are many possible solutions to this problem and what's important is that everyone use the same arbitrary system to communicate.
In this lesson students learn to use their first binary system for encoding information, the ASCII system for representing letters and other characters. At the beginning of the lesson the teacher introduces the fact that computers must represent information using either "on" or "off". Then students are introduced to the ASCII system for representing text using binary symbols. Students practice using this system before encoding their own message using ASCII. At the end of the lesson a debrief conversation helps synthesize the key learning objectives of the activity.