At Starfall, children have fun while they learn.
Starfall.com® opened in September 2002 as a free public service to teach children to read. Since then it has expanded to include language arts and mathematics for preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade. Starfall’s emphasis on phonemic awareness, systematic sequential phonics, and common sight words in conjunction with audiovisual interactivity has proven effective in teaching emergent readers. Starfall activities are research-based and align with Individual and Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics.
The program emphasizes exploration, play, and positive reinforcement—encouraging children to become confident and intrinsically motivated. Starfall is an educational alternative to other entertainment choices for children and is especially effective for special education, homeschooling, and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL). It is widely used in schools that serve children with special needs and learning difficulties.
Our low-cost membership program expands the free content to include animated songs, mathematics, and reading activities spanning K-3. Membership also supports the production of new interactive games, movies, and more for both the Starfall.com website and Starfall apps for mobile devices.

The Starfall reading program is designed to be fun, exciting, and to instill confidence in young children as they learn to read. The website and companion printed materials are clear and effective tools to help you implement proven teaching methods. Our website was created by carefully observing the way children learn using a computer. The Starfall Website is easy for students to navigate independently, but it is not intended as a surrogate for the teacher.

Primarily designed for first grade, Starfall is also useful for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and second grade.

To get a better understanding of complex networks, students create their own, real social network example by interacting with their peers in the classroom and documenting the interactions. They represent the interaction data as a graph, calculate two mathematical quantities associated with the graph—the degree of each node and the degree distribution of the graph—and analyze how these quantities can be used to infer properties of the social network at hand.

Start with a Book: summer reading and learning -- books and activities in science, social studies, arts and literature.
There are 3 ways to enjoy this site:
- Choose a topic to explore: Do you know any young detectives, artists, or inventors? Or children fascinated by dinosaurs, planes, bugs, birds, the night sky, or music? You'll find 24 topics to dive into for a summer full of learning!
- Find great kids’ books: Reading with kids sparks curiosity and conversation. We’ve carefully matched each topic with a wide range of awesome fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and graphic novels to encourage more summer reading.
- Keep the adventure going! Browse our curated collection of topic-related activities, ideas for writing, educational apps, and websites for inquisitive kids — to build background knowledge and deepen summer learning.

Through the innovative use of a collection of tools, Maryland has begun identifying which of its roads and bridges are vulnerable to climate-related events.

To navigate, you must know roughly where you stand relative to your designation, so you can head in the right direction. In locations where landmarks are not available to help navigate (in deserts, on seas), objects in the sky are the only reference points. While celestial objects move fairly predictably, and rough longitude is not too difficult to find, it is not a simple matter to determine latitude and precise positions. In this activity, students investigate the uses and advantages of modern GPS for navigation.

This free printable puts forth a series of questions and statements about dinosaurs playing baseball. (Silly, but kids love it!) Students must punctuate each correctly. Finally, kids are asked to create their own statement and question on the same topic.

Students act as chemical engineers and use LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT robotics to record temperatures and learn about the three states of matter. Properties of matter can be measured in various ways, including volume, mass, density and temperature. Students measure the temperature of water in its solid state (ice) as it is melted and then evaporated.

This hands-on activity explores the concept of static electricity. Students attract an O-shaped piece of cereal to a charged comb and watch the cereal jump away when it touches the comb. Students also observe Styrofoam pellets pulling towards a charged comb, then leaping back to the table.

Students will explore Newton's three laws of motion in different stations that allow them to make observations to determine the concept of each law.

This is an activity about star movement due to the Earth's rotation. Learners will utilize the Sky Tonight online program to find the star that appears stationary in our night sky. They will then draw conclusions about the Earth‰Ûªs rotation based on the position changes of certain stars. This activity requires the use of a computer with Internet access. This activity is Sky Tonight Activity 2 in a larger resource, Space Update.

Student groups rotate through four stations to examine light energy behavior: refraction, magnification, prisms and polarization. They see how a beam of light is refracted (bent) through various transparent mediums. While learning how a magnifying glass works, students see how the orientation of an image changes with the distance of the lens from its focal point. They also discover how a prism works by refracting light and making rainbows. And, students investigate the polar nature of light using sunglasses and polarized light film.

Students apply pre-requisite statistics knowledge and concepts learned in an associated lesson to a real-world state-of-the-art research problem that asks them to quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of different cracked steel repair methods. As if they are civil engineers, students statistically analyze and compare 12 sets of experimental data from seven research centers around the world using measurements of central tendency, five-number summaries, box-and-whisker plots and bar graphs. The data consists of the results from carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer patched and unpatched cracked steel specimens tested under the same stress conditions. Based on their findings, students determine the most effective cracked steel repair method, create a report, and present their results, conclusions and recommended methods to the class as if they were presenting to the mayor and city council. This activity and its associated lesson are suitable for use during the last six weeks of the AP Statistics course; see the topics and timing note for details.

This 8-minute video lesson provides analysis of variance 1: Calculating SST (Total Sum of Squares). [Statistics playlist: Lesson 75 of 85]

This 13-minute video lesson provides analysis of variance 2: Calculating SSW and SSB (total sum of squares within and between). [Statistics playlist: Lesson 76 of 85]

This 10-minute video lesson provies analysis of variance 3: Hypothesis test with F-statistic. [Statistics playlist: Lesson 77 of 85]

This 12-minute video lesson plays with the formula for variance of a population. And looks at alternate variance formulas. [Statistics playlist: Lesson 16 of 85]

This 7-minute video lesson gives formulas for the Bernoulli Distribution Mean and Variance. [Statistics playlist: Lesson 42 of 85]