Education Websites

Find answers to virtually any subject at these sites:

Education.com - Large site with worksheets and activities on hundreds of topics. (T)

Education & Computer Connection - The "Education & Computer Connection" is a valuable source of information for educators, parents and students who use technology to enhance learning. As educators, we must be positive role models for our students. Students must see teachers as proficient users of technology in the classroom. Teachers must provide opportunities for students to access the Internet and the World Wide Web to develop high-quality activities with hands-on use of current technology. (T)

Mrs. Mitchell's Virtual School - (Y, M, O, T)

VerbaLearn - Learn vocabulary at your own pace and on your own time! VerbaLearn is jam-packed with great features to help you study Vocabulary more efficiently, track your progress, score higher, and simply save you time! Use VerbaLearn Basic for free! (M. O)

Chapin-Pinotti Learning Resources - This is awebsite offering free reproducibles and standards-based grade level lessons, workbooks, webquestsand more. The website began as a dissertation project and has evolved. Don't miss the navigation bar at the top - there is much more to the site than what is listed on the homepage. (Y, M, O, T)

KidPast.com - KidPast.com is the fun way to explore our history. We are who we are today, because of those who have gone before us. Brought to you by the KidsKnowIt Network, The Totally Free Learning Network, KidsPast.com is packed with articles from early man, to recent historical events. (Y, M)

InfoPlease.com - All the Knowledge you need. Part of Family Education Network. © 2000–2009 Pearson Education, publishing as Infoplease (Y, M, O, T)

Family Education - About Family Education, part of Family Education Network © 2000-2009 Pearson Education. (T)

Teacher Vision - TeacherVision® is dedicated to helping teachers save time. Find 20,000 pages of classroom-ready lesson plans, printables, and resources. Sign up for a 7-day free trial to explore, or learn more about our annual subscription. (T)

Innovative Classroom - The resources found on Innovative Classroom are quality and in depth. There are a few unit studies, several lesson plans, teacher tips, activities and reproducibles. (T)

Smithsonian Education - Mixed in with resources for sale on this site are the Smithsonian's free lesson plans (PDF downloads), virtual tours, activities and more on a variety of topics. You may search by topic, grade level, and keyword to find specific resources. (T)

Web Quests - A webquest is "an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet". They are excellent tools for unit or topical studies when combined with lessons about how to evaluate the reliability of online resources. Webquest.org is an online database of WebQuests maintained by San Diego State University that currently contains over 2500 WebQuests. The database can be searched by keyword or browsed by grade level and/or topic. (T)

Educator.com - Although the entire site isn't free, there are several free video lessons on Educator.com to get you started with high school science and math courses. These lessons are from excellent instructors (all have doctorate degrees and are currently teaching at universities) and would be a great way to determine whether a student finds a subject interesting enough to take an entire course. Should you like the site and decide to subscribe, it's very affordable. (T)

Educational Freeware - Educational freeware site! Specialized in finding and reviewing high-quality free learning software and websites from the Internet - mostly for kids, but also for grown-ups. A large selection of web-based software as well as Windows software to download. (Y, M, O, T)

Brain Pop - BrainPOP creates animated, curriculum-based content that supports educators and engages students. Our award-winning online educational resources include BrainPOP Jr. (K-3), BrainPOP, and BrainPOP Español. All are supported by BrainPOP Educators, which features free lesson plans, video tutorials, professional development tools, graphic organizers, and best practices for our teacher community. (Y, M, O, T)

e-Learning for Kids - Our vision is to be the source for childhood learning on the Internet – available from anywhere and without charge. Established in late 2004, e-Learning for Kids is a global, nonprofit foundation dedicated to fun and free learning on the Internet for children ages 5 - 12. We offer free, best-in-class courseware in math, science, reading and keyboarding; and we’re building a community for parents and educators to share innovations and insights in childhood education. Grades K-6th. (Y, M,)

WannaLearn.com - Over 350 categories of free, first-rate, family-safe online tutorials, guides and instructionally oriented Websites! (Y, M, O, T)

101 Ways to Save Money on Homeschooling - A book that can help you save hundreds of dollars, and you can download it here absolutely FREE! (T)

Evaluate Schoolhouse Test - Create tests and quizzes with eight different question types: multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blanks, matching, short answer, list, order, true/false, long answer. The only limitation to the evaluation is that tests print with banners. Otherwise, the software is fully functional. (T)

Teaching That Sticks - This blog is intended to share one teacher's insights and observations about small ways to make teaching stick. (T)

Thinkfinity.org - Thinkfinity.org is the cornerstone of Verizon Foundation's literacy, education and technology initiatives. Our goal is to improve student achievement in traditional classroom settings and beyond by providing high-quality content and extensive professional development training. (Y, M, O, T)

Core Knowledge® Resources - Lesson plans - This collection contains units developed by teachers in Core Knowledge schools and presented at recent Core Knowledge National Conferences. The units are organized by grade level, and within grade level by subject area. (Y, M)

The Classical Scholar - Diane Lockman created this website as an encouragement to parents homeschooling with the classical method. She now homeschools her high school students whom she has homeschooled for nine years. The site reflects Diane's Christian faith and includes such topics as: Designing Curriculum, Developing Character, Equipping Parents, Supervising High School, Teaching Reading Skills, Teaching Speaking Skills and Teaching Thinking Skills. (T)

SchoolExpress.com - SchoolExpress has a variety of educational materials. We have lots of FREE items and an online store. Teachers, homeschooling families, parents, children, and grandparents use our site. (T)

BJ Pinchbeck's College Companion - "All Things College". This site will act as your companion to Internet links that will prove valuable while preparing for and attending college. (O, T)

BJ Pinchbeck's Homework Helper - Formerly a division of the Discovery website family, BJ Pinchbeck's Homework Helper has relaunched on its own domain. BJ and his dad started the site when BJ was 9 years old (he's 20 and a student at Drexel University now). The site includes hundreds of links to some of the best educational websites by subject. Now that he is a college student, BJ has also launched BJ's College Companion, a guide to preparing for and entering college. (Y, M, O, T)

ThinkQuest Library - Over 7,000 websites created by students around the world who have participated in a ThinkQuest Competition. Arts & Entertainment, Books & Literature, Business & Industry, Computers & the Internet, Geography & Travel, Health & Safety, History & Government, Math, Philosophy, Religion & Mythology, Science & Technology, Social Sciences & Culture, and Sports & Recreation. (Y, M, O, T)

New York Times Learning Network - Connections for students, teachers and parents. Grades 3-12 (Y, M, O, T)

SchoolExpress - A variety of educational materials. We have lots of FREE items and an online store. Teachers, homeschooling families, parents, children, and grandparents use our site. (Y, M, O, T)

Live and Learn resources - Live and Learn Press offers many lapbook resources (called Learn 'N Folders) and their freebie page includes several PDF downloads for free, including an Apple Learn 'N Folder, How to Fold a ShutterFold Book, and an All About Me Folder. If you join their Yahoo group (the link is on the page), you also get folders for Thanksgiving, St. Patrick's Day and Fourth of July. (Y, M, O, T)

Teaching Heart - Back To School Printables/ Worksheets Free to Print From Teaching Heart! (t)

The Lesson Machine Blogazine - Looking for great ideas to complement our phenomenal members’ resources? Look no further. TheLessonMachine.Com is proud to announce the launch of our companion blog for educators, parents, program staff and administrators around the world. Don’t forget to check here first for great ideas on classroom budget, activities, resources, career issues and more. We’ll leave the coffee pot on! (t)

Keith's Think Zone - Fun and interesting miscellany for school kids of all ages. (Teachers and other adults are also permitted.) (Y, M, O, T)

KidsKnowIt - This extensive site is actually a portal to several sub-sites covering geography, history, spelling, science, memory, and more. All resources (including games, worksheets, databases, activities, and more) are completely free. (Y, M, O, T)

School Express - Free Thematic Units and Activity eWorkbooks (Y)

Hotchalk.com - HotChalk is a learning environment for K-12 teachers, students and parents that includes a learning management system (LMS), a rich library of teacher-contributed lesson plans, premium digital content like NBC News video, and professional development for teachers in a Web-based environment. Available through any Internet browser, the HotChalk Learning Environment is an easy to use system and brings teachers, students and parents together to improve education. (Y, M, O, T)

Teachnet.com - Daily tips and creative ideas for busy teachers. Website includes lesson plans, teacher-to-teacher resources and education mailing lists. (T)

The Teachers Corner.net - Teacher Resources and Lesson Plans (T)

Library of Congress:The Learning Page - Features & Activities are designed with the teacher in mind. Activities offer an interactive, "hands on" experience and focus on a specific topic, rather than broad themes. They require teacher direction, but invite students to participate. Feature Presentations look across the American Memory collections to investigate curricular themes. They include historical background, helping to tell the story behind the theme. (Y, M, O, T)

The Learning Page - The Learning Page is designed to help educators use the American Memory Collections to teach history and culture. It offers tips and tricks, definitions and rationale for using primary sources, activities, discussions, lesson plans and suggestions for using the collections in classroom curriculum. (Y, M, O, T)

KidZone - Fun Facts for kids - Animal Facts, Geography, Language Arts, Magic Tricks, Math & Science for Preschool through grade 5. (Y)

Making Learning Fun - An early childhood education website filled with free printables designed to do just that, make learning fun! Grades Pre K - 2nd (Y)

Apples 4 the teacher - A Fun Educational Website for Teachers and Kids. Online Games and Resources for Toddlers, Preschoolers, Kindergarten, and Elementary Students. Kid Safe Teacher Created Primary Website with Homeschooling Activities. (Y, M, O, T)

Super Teacher Worksheets - Free, Printable Worksheets (Y, M, O, T)

Alphabet Soup - Alphabet Soup contains thematic units, holiday units, games and activities for kids; teacher and parent resources; and crafts, humor and recipes for all! Be sure to check out the Kindergarten Kafe, recipes dictated by 5-year-olds! Includes plenty of free printables! (Y, M, O, T)

Debbie's Unit Factory - Quality elementary level theme units for teachers and home schoolers (Y, M, O, T)

Busy Teacher's Cafe - A K-6 site for busy teachers like you! (Y, M, O, T)

kiddyhouse.com - The Resource Center for Kids and teachers. (Y, M, O, T)

Super Teacher Worksheets - Tim at Super Teacher Worksheets offers hundreds of useful worksheets and graphic organizers for everything from math to handwriting. Whether you are looking for more practice with word problems or just some holiday word searches, you are likely to find it here. (T)

Harper Collins for Teachers and Librarians - From Harper Collins Children's divisions. Includes a plan ahead calendar of holidays and events, book reviews, teaching resources and book activities. A nice resource for Authors and Illustrators too! (T)

Harper Collins - Parents - From the Harper Collins Children's division. Picture book sweepstakes, Character laptime activities and a pre-school clubhouse. (Y)

Exploratorium - The museum of science, art and human perception. Online since 1993, the Exploratorium was one of the first science museums to build a site on the World Wide Web. Our site now contains over 18 thousand award-winning Web pages exploring hundreds of different topics. (Y, M, O, T)

HippoCampus - HippoCampus provides free, multi-media content in many subjects, including Algebra, Physics, Calculus, Environmental Science, U.S. History and more. I found it to be a bit awkward to navigate around entire books on the site, but there is a wealth of information online at no cost. (Y, M, O, T)

Smithsonian Education - The central education website of the Smithsonian institute. Information and resources for educators, families and students. (Y, M, O, T)

A Kids Heart - A play and learn site with FREE resources for kids and their teachers. (Y, M, O, T)

How to Teach Science - Teresa Bondora taught high school science for 8 years before dropping her kids out and becoming a Homeschooler. Teresa has seen first hand how intimidated home educators can be of science and has committed herself to developing materials to help reduce the fear factor and bring out the love of science. Her website, How to Teach Science, has articles, lessons, and activities for the homeschooling parent as well as affordable products for helping teach science. Sign up for her fr๋๋ee newsletter for a new chemical element lesson each issue. (T)

Fact Checked - "We’re overwhelmed with messages every day, many of them attempts to persuade us to do or buy something.Our aim is to help students learn to be smart consumers of these messages, to see through the deceptions that they encounter daily, to dig for facts using the Internet and other resources, and to set aside prejudice and weigh evidence logically... The materials on this site, then, are tools to teach them to see through spin. Under the heading Tools of the Trade we’ve outlined a five-step framework for analyzing information and avoiding deception. That process is the essence of what we do at FactCheck.org, where we have been de-bunking false and misleading claims in politics since 2003." Brought to you by the the Annenberg Public Policy Center supported by a grant from the Flora Family Foundation. (O T)

Smithsonian Education - A place for kids to explore, discover and learn. (Y, M, O, T)

The Teacher's Cafe - The Teachers Cafe is designed to, first and foremost, give teachers and home school parents free resources to make their lives easier and to improve their teaching. In addition, it gives parents the tools to aid and tutor their children. Finally, it allows students and all learners of the world to gain knowledge at their own desires and motivation. Online interactive activities and games in the subjects of reading, math, writing, science, social studies and grammar make learning fun and effective. The online activities directory in The Teachers Cafe will enhance the teacher's lessons and give parents an alternative to boring work, not to mention an alternative to video games. The lesson plans directory will give teachers an easy-to-use, categorized gathering of the best web sites that provide free lesson plans. Parents who do home schooling or tutoring can use the lesson plans for ideas and to see what is being taught. (T)

Merriam-Webster Online - Not just a dictionary source. Also offers Free games on line such as Daily Crossword, PuzzleWord Game, Daily Buzzword For Kids, Word of the Day and a Daily Podcast (Y, M, O, T)

Encyclopædia Britannica Online - Encyclopædia Britannica - the Online Encyclopedia (Y, M, O, T)

Fact Monster - Brought to you by Information Please © 2000–200p Pearson Education, publishing as Fact Monster. Contains a Reference Desk, information on Math & Money, Science, the World, the United States, People, Computers, Sports, Word Wise, Games & Puzzles and a Home Center. (Y, M, O, T)

Teacher Help - The purpose of this web site is to provide free and low cost resources for school teachers, home school, and Christian children's ministry (T)

ProTeacher.com - (T)

Reach Every Child - Welcome to Reach Every Child. Horace Mann and nationally recognized teacher, Alan Haskvitz, developed this site of educational resources for teachers and students. It includes lesson plans to make reaching students and using technology easier. Learn more about the site. (T)

Easy Test Maker - EasyTestMaker is a FREE online test generator to help you create your tests. With Easy Test Maker you can create multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching, short answer and true and false questions all on the same test. You can also insert instructions and divide your test into multiple sections. (T)

Education Oasis - From forms to book reviews, this site is a wealth of resources for teachers by teachers. Use the navigation bar across the top to find all kinds of downloads and resources. The Curriculum section includes a Teacher's Calendar listing events and holidays for each month of the year to make relating your curriculum to current events easier. Ready Reference in the Resources section includes a list of pertinent sites for just about any kind of research and reference from quotations to statistics. (Y, M, O, T)

Freebies from Teacher Created Materials - Free monthly activities including calendars and teaching tips can be found at the TCM website. The best find is the free weekly lesson plans, activities, and brain teasers. All of the archives are posted as well, so there are hundreds of free printout resources! (Y, M, O, T)

42eXplore - Why start with a search engine, when you can find a pathfinder to fit your needs at 42eXplore? When learning something new, it's nice to have more than one resource to explore. This web project provides "four to eXplore" for each topic. On each page you'll find definitions, activities, the 4 good starting points, and many more links and resources for the thematic topic. Go to the About Site page for more information about the website. (Y, M, O, T)

Paperbacks for Educators - Literature list by age, grade, theme (T)

Can Teach - CanTeach was created to assist teachers in finding and using elementary resources online. The resources are broken up into two categories. There is a section of Elementary Resources which consists of lesson plans and resources, as well as a section of annotated Links. The site is useful for anyone but Canadian educators will appreciate the focus on resources for them. (T)

BBC Children - BBC has one of the best children's sites on the web. It has long been my favorites for their flash games, but the site is large and has much more to offer. School Day 24 connects kids all over the world, particularly kids living in areas of conflict. Science, nature, history, and more are covered in ways that get kids engaged. The site also includes movie reviews, articles, and links to other areas of the BBC site like health and sport, cooking, and more. (Y, M, O, T)

Evaluating Web Pages - With so much information available online it can be confusing to figure out just what is reliable. This Teaching Library Internet Workshop from UC Berkeley teaches how to evaluate the authority of information using such criteria as the URL, the content, and referring websites. This is a skill that every student should learn and Evaluating Web Pages is an excellent breakdown of checking reliability. (T)

Textbook Revolution - "Textbook Revolution is the web’s source for free educational materials. This is a student-run, volunteer-operated website started in response to the textbook industry’s constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value... At Textbook Revolution, you’ll find links to textbooks and select educational resources of all kinds. Some of the books are PDF files, others are viewable only online as e-books. Most books are aimed at undergraduates, but there are at least a few resources at every level, from kindergarten to post-doc. All of the books are offered for free by their respective copyright holders for online viewing." (Y, M, O, T)

Knowledge Hound - Knowledge Hound is a large portal site with links to information about just about everything. Want to know the history of baseball or how to avoid investment scams? It's all here, organized in logical topic-oriented lists. Each results page also offers links to topics related to the topic you searched for, making it even easier for you to get lost on rabbit trails! Note that although the site has much information that would be useful for kids' studies, it is not a children's site and might contain links to information you would deem inappropriate. Please preview the site before letting your children use it. (T)

Web English Teacher - Children's Literature (Y,M)

A to Z Teacher Stuff Tools - Although A to Z Teacher Stuff is a large site with much more than these tools to offer, I wanted to highlight the tools because they are so useful. You can create your own worksheets for free at the website with a Word Shapes Worksheet Generator (helpful (Y, M, O, T)

Ed Heads - "Edheads helps students learn through educational games and activities... [and] has been recognized by almost every major award on the Web for our excellent educational content!" Watch a virtual (cartoon) hip replacement or knee surgery, learn about simpl (Y, M, O, T)

Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators - "Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators is a categorized list of sites useful for enhancing curriculum and professional growth. It is updated often to include the best sites for teaching and learning." (T)

High School Ace - The Academic Homepage for High School Students (O,T)

AskJeeves For Kids - I have mixed emotions about this search engine - it gives safe results for kids, but it hasn't been very useful in our specific searches. Try it and see if it helps your kids. (Y, M, O, T)

Smithsonian Education - A gateway to Smithsonian Educational Resources. For educators, families and students. (Y, M, O, T)

Enchanted Learning - This huge site contains activities and lessons for all elementary students. With sections for holidays, explorers, dinosaurs, crafts, calendars, printouts to be labeled and colored, maps, world flags, geography, nursery rhymes, animal printouts, science projects, and more! (Y, M, O, T)

Yahoo Kids - Comprehensive site for kids. Seems to have replaced Yahooligans. News, Help, Play Games, Watch Music Videos, Check Out Movies, Learn About Science, Read Jokes and Send Ecards (Y, M, O, T)