Looking for activities and lessons for preparing students for the 21st century? Well, this is the jackpot of resources. I was introduced to this site at a conference on the subject of 21st Century curriculum, and this site is loaded with ideas for alternative forms for assessing students. You will also find various links to websites that offer interactive and student owned activities and projects.

Looking for a synonym to jazz up a piece of writing? You, and students, can use visual thesaurus to find that word. The "visual" part of this online thesaurus stems from the web of words that results from a search. For example, if I was looking for a synonym for cool, I'd type the word in the search bar, and a web would be created with "cool" in the center. Stemming off the center is a color coded assortment of alternatives for "cool", and the colors are based on the meaning of "cool". What a fast and fun way to search for words!

Looking for an alternative way to search for images? Tag Galaxy is a site where you can type in a subject, such as "The Revolutionary War", and you'll be directed to a selection of photographs about the Revolutionary war. These are photographs that people have tagged, and many of the photos come with descriptions. This is a great site for visual learning.

Students can use this site to find data and statistics on almost any subject. For example, a student could enter "Wisconsin" in the search bar and find out anything from population to the lowest point in the state. I even typed in my name, and found that there are just over 888,000 Sarahs expected to be alive today. This site is informative as well as interesting!

This site can be used make a visual representation of text. You could also use it to help kids evaluate a writing piece's word choice, for words that are used most often are displayed the largest in a wordle. Students could then revise their writing and show word choice changes by creating a second wordle from their modified writing piece.

You can do an advanced search on Google images to find public domain and creative commons that students are free to share and reuse.

A fun site where kids can create their own Garfield comic strip

A bountiful resource for reader's theatre scripts.

This website is a great resource for teaching environmental science at the elementary level. Journey North allows students of various ages to observe and post migration patterns or seasonal changes. Students can also look at posts from others in various regions and study patterns of migration and seasonal changes. I did this one year with my first graders and they enjoyed sharing their observations and hearing about others'.

This site has some handy and downloadable graphic organizers for science and math. A few I enjoyed were the number line and hundreds chart as well as the organizer for the water cycle.

Excellent site for printable K-12 literacy based graphic organizers.

Use this site to find a literacy lesson, or share a gem of your own.

The games on this site will help students build their multiplication skills, and they will have a blast as they learn. Give the Diaper Derby game a try!

A fun Thanksgiving project you can make out of sweets.

Keep yourself, and you students, current on any exciting events or contests going on at the public library, one of our community's most valuable resources.

Great for showing weather statistics and averages.

PDP writing and reviewing

Mary's site provides assessment resources for each grade level and unit of Everyday Math. You will need a username and password to access the resources, but you can easily obtain this from the district.

Science and Math interactive learning activities (Gizmos) for student learning.

@ Bill: We do still have some licenses. I've used Gizmos this year. I would ask Christine about getting your kids on (?).