2 Sites Help Awaken Brains From Mental Hibernation
With the new year welcomed in, it’s time to return to familiar routines. For children, that usually means getting back to their studies and for teachers, devising new lesson plans. FunBrain.com and Education Place provide students, teachers and parents with plenty of education-based content and resources to jump-start their winter lessons.
FunBrain.com
https://www.funbrain.com
FunBrain.com takes a no-nonsense approach to online learning by providing just enough fun to make it interesting without losing sight of the basics. Kids can play a variety of educational games at FunBrain.com, but the site’s primary mission is to provide teachers with online resources for use in elementary and middle-school classrooms.
About 150,000 teachers use FunBrain’s Quiz Lab, a tool that provides thousands of quizzes in math, reading, science, history, art, computers and music. Once teachers register for this free service, they can assign their students age-appropriate online quizzes, which are automatically graded with results e-mailed to the instructor. The quiz assignments can be completed in the school computer lab or at home.
All users are welcome at FunBrain regardless of whether they participate in Quiz Lab. There are more than 50 games including the most popular, Math Baseball, in which kids learn addition, multiplication, subtraction and division and score runs for every correct answer. They can also play “Grammar Gorillas” to identify parts of speech, “Soccer Shootout” for help with fractional equations and the “Where Is That?” geography game. The Parents Place helps parents find appropriate games for their kids.
FunBrain plans to expand its offerings with MyFunBrain, which incorporates quizzes and games in a new learning program. Based on age and skill levels, the program is designed to track students’ progress in addition to customize the curriculum to meet the child’s particular needs.
Education Place
https://www.eduplace.com
Houghton Mifflin’s School Division publishes textbooks and other classroom resources. Education Place provides a showcase for the company’s educational products as well as online resources for teachers, students and parents. It’s a very large site so a quick trip to the site map is advised to view what’s available in the main sections--Education Place, Kids’ Place and Parents’ Place.
Kids’ Place includes Games, Roz’s Picks and School Books. The pickings in Games are pretty slim. But the offerings perk up in Roz’s Picks, especially in the Science Library Adventures area. For example, clicking on “Why Save a Rain Forest?” in Grade 5 brings up a summary of issues regarding rain forests, a teacher’s guide for lessons and an activity on saving rain forests.
The Reading Scene primarily serves as an advertisement for popular Houghton Mifflin children’s books and authors but also includes features such as word plays, puzzles and Web links with online discussions about books. Wacky Web Tales is a neat feature--an online variation of Mad Libs that allows users to type in names, nouns, numbers and adjectives and then have them inserted in a story.
Teachers will find most of their resources in Education Place, which includes a database of more than 400 original elementary and middle-school activities and lessons with extra material on reading, language arts, math, science and social studies. Also included are teacher-written reviews of favorite classroom books, bibliographies, monthly educational themes and current events.
Parents’ Place features a home activity center, data on homework help, tips for helping kids become active readers, textbook support, shopping options and links for home schooling.
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Karen Jones is a freelance writer specializing in children’s interactive media.
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Kids’ Web Sites
Education Place
https://www.eduplace.com
* Company-sponsored site with lesson plans and activities
FunBrain.com
https://www.funbrain.com
* Straightforward site with lots of resources for parents, kids and teachers