Updates will be on hold for a day or two. Please spare a thought for the children, staff, and parents of Plaza Towers Elementary School, Moore, Oklahoma. There are no words for a tragedy like this.

Welcome, teachers! We have lots of LESSON PLANS for you on our Teachers & Parents pages! Our A to Z Index of Kid Sites is the largest on the Web! Do you have a favorite site we don't show? Why not let us know?

Scroll down past the subject matrix to see our ever-changing list of newly added sites!

	A-Z Site List		Added Sites		Ancient History		Animals & Cams		Art
	Astronomy		Black Hills		Dinosaurs & Paleontology		Down- loads		Early Learning
	General, Specialty		Health		Holiday Games		Home School		Iditarod
	Life Skills		Literacy		Mathematics		Music		Portals, Hotlists
	Read Alouds		School Sites		Science & Nature		Social Studies		Sports
	Teachers Parents		Technology		Telling Time		Statement of Purpose		Disclaimer
	Challenges for Gifted & Talented		Teeth & Dental		Women's History

Last updated 21 May 2013

What's This is our ever changing list of recently added sites, plus the occasional oldie. These are not in alphabetical order. Generally, sites get added on the top and eventually get taken off the bottom.

The Native American Drum "The drum is not just a musical instrument. To the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people, it holds great cultural and symbolic power. They believe the drum has a life of its own, as well as its own powerful spirit. The drum is the heartbeat of the Indian Nation. It carries the heartbeat of Mother Earth and calls the spirits and nations together." Read the complete page to learn more. Going in Black Hills.

The Butterfly Website "is the world's oldest and largest website dedicated to butterflies and moths. Here you'll find hundreds of articles about butterflies and moths, an extensive clipart collection, many photographs, videos, butterfly gardening tips, links to purchase butterflies for your wedding or special event, and a lot more." Also an FAQ page with 25 general questions and answers about butterflies, moths, and caterpillars; and page of links to butterfly curricula. Going in Animals

Logic Games from Coolmath-Games. "These will build your brain better than any and we've got some classics here!" 162 thinking games to build logic skills! Going in Challenges and in Mathematics> Intermediate, >Logic, and >Secondary.

Geography Games from Coolmath-Games. "How well do you know your countries, states and capitals?" These are excellent! Learn The US states and capitals, the states of Mexico, the provinces and territories of Canada, and the countries of the continents! Not since Seterra have we found geography drills this good. Face it, the only way to become a geography master is to drill and practice. Most American students know next to nothing about geography. :( Going in Challenges and in Social Studies > Geography.

Teach Ocean Science Amazing, stupendous, colossal. This site features teacher resources (lesson plans) in three sections. (1) Ocean science curriculum "Teach an entire ocean science course or incorporate ocean concepts into your science classroom using this database of scientist and teacher-approved lesson plans." (2) Using the ocean to teach STEM has five interdisciplinary STEM activities ready to go as pdf files. (3) Modules - ten modules and a glossary covering various animal, vegetable, and mineral aspects of the sea. "Brush up on your ocean science content knowledge or find lesson plans to teach about the coastal ocean using these graphic interactive modules compiled by teams of scientists, teachers, and students." Going in Science & Nature >Biomes, Ecology, and Habitats, & > Earth Science and Teachers & Parents.

Physical Constants for Fire Investigators. This a forensics site from Australia. It's valuable to teachers and students who need to know: flame colors, melting points and ignition temperatures of different plastics, metals (melting points), liquids (boiling points, flash points, ignition temperature, and heat of combustion in kcals/gram), gases (flammable limits, ignition temperature). Special sections for steel, concrete, glass, and house insulation. Good for physics and chemistry, among other things. BTW all temps are in Celsius. Going in Science & Nature > Earth Science and in Technology.

Earthquakes for Kids from the U.S. Geological Survey (the USGS). Consists of 12 kid-friendly sections: Latest Quakes, Links & Activities, Puzzles & Games, Today in Earthquake History, Science Fair Project Ideas, Animations, How to become an earthquake scientists, Facts, Pictures, Ask a Geologist, the science of earthquakes, and a glossary. Going in Science & Nature > Earth Science.

Explore.org's Live Cams Over 40 different live cams. Many of animals, birds, and fishes; others of beaches and exotic places like Hawaii. Quite a few "baby animal cams" - wild bears, birds nesting, pandas, puppies, kittens. This link defaults to the Beluga Cam at the Vancouver Aquarium. Scroll down to see more cams. Going in Animal Cams.

Hummingbird webcam "Phoebe, a Channel Islands Allen's Hummingbird, has a live webcam and eggs that are hatching soon." Sounds like fun. Hope Phoebe and her descendants will keep nesting!

Phoebe is back for 2013. Same URL! Still at Animal Cams.

The Water Cycle in an easy to understand graphic! Going in Science & Nature > Earth Science.

Her project name is Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer. Here is the input form for biopsies. "The current network is 99.11% sensitive to malignancy (after) 7.6 million trials." Ms. Wenger wants to improve upon this 99.1% accuracy.

Wonderful! GSFK will always proud to feature the stories of students like her! Going in Challenges, Health, and Technology.

Covers anything related to space. Great photo galleries and videos. Sections for: Spaceflight, Science & Astronomy, Search for Life, Skywatching, Tech, and more. Stay up to date on space news and enjoy all those amazing photo galleries! Going in Astronomy.

Sunstones! - Shipwreck Discovery May be Fabled Sunstone - what is it? The Alderney Crystal was originally transparent, but the sea water had turned it a milky white. Going in Ancient History & Technology.

Sylvia at the White House! Awesome Maker Sylvia of Sylvia's Super Awesome Maker Show! went to the 3rd Annual White House Science Fair, showed off her WaterColorBot paint pen plotter to President Obama (he tried it out) and was interviewed by Bill Nye the Science Guy and Levar Burton! There are videos of this, too. (We posted Sylvia's site back in November 2012) We wish this young lady and her family all the best! Kids, if your talents run in this area and you feel alone, do not be discouraged, but find local groups for Makers. Going in Challenges and Technology.

Sky Marvels This site will knock your socks off! The whole site was made using the awesome free astronomy program, Celestia! The best way to explore Sky Marvels is to just dive in, look around, see what you like! It's akmost fractal in the number of side trails you can explore. Very educational and fun, too! Thank you, Gary M. Winter, for developing and posting this marvel! Going in Astronomy.

Education Index "The Education Index at PhDs.org is the Internet’s premier source of updated, clear educational data about undergraduate and graduate programs in the United States. We use publicly available numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and strive to present them in a simple and easy-to-digest way. Our desire is to make it easy for you to pick the best college you possibly can with this index: a college that fits your financial, social and educational interests and goals." You can browse through their large amount of well-organized data in various ways, too. If this site might help you to choose a university program that suits your needs, please check it out! Going in General/Specialty, Life Skills, and Teachers & Parents.

Storybud is a site with stories for the reading impaired and dyslexics. That doesn't mean that others can't enjoy this site as well! Readers may choose different text and background color combinations besides black on white (our fave was yellow on purple) and may choose different font sizes as well. "On Storybud there are text versions of stories, audio versions of stories, and combined text and audio stories. Storybud is not a business. Our mission is simply to share the joy of stories from around the world for free." They welcome your text/audio stories, your requests for stories, and would like to link to other ed sites. We believe this site is a worthy effort, and that it would be useful for many readers! Going in Homeschool, Literacy > New Readers and > Read Alouds, and Teachers & Parents.

Shakespeare's slang How much of the English language was invented by this man? A lot! Going in Literacy > Seconday School Literature

History of life on Earth from the BBC. Their usual informative and creative treatment, this time in the form of an interactive timeline that keeps expanding, and again, and so on, and so on... The first timeline starts at 4.6 billion years ago and stops at 0.2 million years ago. To maintain a semblance of scale you can magnify the last 600 million years to make another time scale, and then another for last 250 million years. (This scheme was well thought out!) The last timeline stops at the end of the last ice age. Scrolling down from the timelines, you find Geological time periods. This covers 19 eras from 3.8 billion years ago to the present time. Click on the thumbnail for any era and you'll be drawn into a wealth of cool facts, pix, and information! Go down the page and there are more thumbnails - colorful sections about the Big Five mass extinction events, Mass extinction theories, and Ancient Earth habitats. If you do it all at once, your eyes'll be glazed! Tons of information to supplement your textbook, to use for a report, or just to wonder at the awesomeness of time. Going in Challenges and in Dinosaurs & Paleontology.

Human History of the Colorado Plateau "The prehistoric people of the Colorado Plateau, the so-named Ancestral Puebloans, lived here for well over a thousand years. While the geology and scenic beauty and diversity of flora and fauna compliments the territory's featured assets, the achievement and cultural advance of these people is noteworthy." This site's an overview of the people, how they endured over time, their changing culture, their agriculture, their changing architecture, the kivas, Chaco Canyon, and the 21 present Pueblos. There's a big section for tourists of all ages on what not to do called "ARCHEOLOGICAL RULES OF THE ROAD". Please read it and remember it. BTW there are LOTS of photos and paintings to let you see all this wonder! Going in Ancient History.

I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate A Spoken Word video from Suli Breaks, British recording artist. Over half a million people worldwide have viewed this video. Looks like maybe half of them left comments! A protest against standardized, one-size-fits-all education systems. It's a pretty gripping video. (Warning: This video will make you THINK!) Also an advocacy of finding a career that you enjoy, following your dream instead of being a wage slave. Don't want to put any more words in his mouth, out of respect. GSFK agrees with the plug: You Have To Watch This!! Choose your own POV and discuss this with other viewers. Going in Homeschool, Literacy > Speech and Speaking and Secondary School Literature, and Teachers & Parents.

Mineralpedia– A Mineral Photo Database and Identification Guide. An A to Z guide of hundreds of minerals, in color! Dakota Matrix Minerals is a commercial operation, so the minerals you see are mostly for sale. Therefore, they're displayed really well. The mineral galleries and search function are a big help. This site is constantly being updated with new arrivals from all over the world. This site may turn students into rock hounds :) Going in Science & Nature > Earth Science.

Just in case Red Fish goes away (shudder), the good people at the site have provided stand-alone links to Amos from Outer Space and the awesome interactive encyclopedia Encyclopedia Interactica. Perhaps more parts of Red Fish will also be "spun off". Stay tuned and keep checking the Red Fish site!

Here are three sites from the Knowledge Adventure people (and thanks for the email!). Guess what? They all have app versions!

Math Blaster the venerable game is now an online math learning station! The bulk of the online activities are subscription only, but there are oodles of downloadable pdf worksheets, sorted by grade level and by the basic operations. Going in Homeschool and Mathematics > Primary and > Intermediate.

Jumpstart is another familiar name with subscription games and free goodies, too. A good sized free pdf worksheet section and more besides. Mostly for the younger set. Going in Early Learning, Homeschool, and Mathematics > Primary.

KA has 100 free games indexed alphabetically; and by grade (pre-K - 6), subject (the 3 Rs plus Animals and Science), age (toddler to 12), and arcade games. There are mobile games, too. Down at the bottom there's an idex of all three sites' game, activities, worksheets, curriculum, resources list, and lesson plans. Going in Early Learning, Homeschool, Mathematics > Primary and > Intermediate, and in Teachers & Parents.

Untangling the web: how spiders use their silk Very informative and colorful graphic from, and owned by, The Guardian. It turns out spiders have six different silk glands that make six different kinds of silk for six different purposes. Going in Animals and Technology.

OLogy is the American Museum of Natural History's "Science Website for Kids". It's been on GSFK for quite a while, now. They just keep getting better and better, so we're showcasing them! The Feature of the Day on the OLogy home page is Talking to Fireflies an awesome kid-friendly page that explains how fireflies use their biochemical lights to flash signals, and how the signals differ with species. There's also a feature called Carly's Adventures in Waspland, a comic all about wasps! Fireflies and Wasps are both in the Zoology section with 19 other features. The big exhibition at the Museum as of this writing is Whales: Giants of the Deep, which starts with a nice video explain what the exhibit covers. The written subsections give in-depth information about the subtopics, for example: Whale Evolution (Whales: G o t D is not part of the kid site but it's cool). Anyway, OLogy covers 14 areas of science, from Anthropology to Zoology, and they're all wonderful. You could spend most of a semester of elementary science just doing OLogy! OLogy is already listed under Challenges, Dinosaurs, Science & Nature, and Social Studies.

Science and Technology Focus from the Office of Naval Research, USN. It's their kids and teachers site about oceanography, space, and submarines!

Oceanography > Ocean in Motion covers characteristics of currents, tides, waves, and the Beaufort Wind Scale. Habitats covers, well, habitats of the ocean. Ocean Life covers marine mammals, sea turtles and California Sea Lions. Ocean Water looks at the properties of sea water (in depth :P) while Ocean Regions covers littoral, blue water, and the ocean floor. All the subsection topics have quizzes at the end, too! Then there's a short section on famous research vessels.

Space Sciences with its two main sections, Observing the Sky and the Solar System, covers basic introduction the various sections of astronomy and have tons of information. The Navy & Satellites includes satellite launch trajectories, orbits, and how GPS works.

Blow the Ballast! has a history of submarines (including the rescue of the USS Squalus), how submarines work, and a section on people under the sea.

Different sections are going in Animals, Astronomy, Science & Nature > Biomes, Ecology, and Habitats, > Earth Science, > Weather, and in Technology.

Medieval Map "This website illustrates the historical changes that occurred in the Medieval Era (400 - 1500) with an interactive map." Understatement! Move back and forth through time in 10 to 50 year intervals. Click on one button to show cities, another to show decisive battles. Click the ? button to see a modern map. For battles, there is a brief synopsis in a popup window, with the option to go to Wikipedia. Clicking on a city icon sends you directly to Wikipedia. The map shows all the contemporary peoples and states for the period you choose. Clicking on any label (example: "Balts") brings up a three-section pie graph. One section - the "W", sends you to Wikipedia. Clicking the folder" icon opens up a book or article, if there is one (in this case an e-book called "The Balts", by Marija Gimbutas). Clicking on the "film" icon will open a video, if there is one. The site is constantly being improved. It's quite a trip through time for middle school and older. Visual learners may finally grasp the idea of huge groups of peoples moving across Europe. See empires and kingdoms rise and disappear. Wonder at names like the Umayyads, the White Sheep Turks, the Principality of Polotsk, Navarre, Swabia, Trebizond, and all the rest. Going in Ancient History and Social Studies > Geography, > Maps, Mapping, Cartography, and in > History.

Plankton Chronicles "Plankton are any organisms that live in the water column and are incapable of swimming against a current. They provide a crucial source of food to many large aquatic organisms, such as fish and whales." (from Wikipedia) Watch videos and see photos of various sorts of plankton. There are 16 HD videos with more being added. Each narration explains the organism it's about. Very good quality videos with good sound, too. Click and explore the ocean and see different kinds of plankton emerge. This covers larval crustaceans, larval fish, cnidarians, ctenophores, diatoms, mollusks, tunicates, larval worms, various echinoderms, and more. All these can be plankton. Going in Animals and Science & Nature > Biomes, Ecology, and Habitats and > Living Things.

DisclaimerSites added in the last 60 days

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