Look no further for holiday activities for your ESL and ELL students (or for reading/listening comprehension activities you can use with all learners! This site lists conventional and unusual holidays by month. Click the holiday you would like to feature to find a complete lesson including a tape script, an oral recording of the script, and a variety of review exercises. The printable activities include matching, several varieties of fill-in-the-blank, word choices, spelling, reordering events and sentences from the holiday information, and writing activities. An online clickable reading activity presents parts of sentences, so students must select which sentence part comes first. The screen changes when the correct part comes up, and students select the next part.
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Whether you have a few minutes or a few days to light the Olympic torch in your classroom, TeachersFirst offers these resources to guide the way to medal-winning lessons. This collection of reviewed resources from TeachersFirst is selected to help teachers and students learn more about the Vancouver Olympics, 2010, and to plan curriculum-related projects and classroom activities around the Olympic winter games in Vancouver. These links may also be helpful to compare the Vancouver games with other years.
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This collection of reviewed resources from TeachersFirst is selected to help teachers and students learn more about HIV and AIDS and to plan curriculum-related projects and classroom activities related to this sensitive but important topic. Whether you are teaching about the global economic impact of HIV and AIDS or simply helping students understand HIV and AIDS as a health topic, this list of reviewed resources and classroom ideas will provide a solid foundation.
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This website is a source of free, downloadable documentaries. It is a nonprofit site. The site explains, “you can stream interesting and provocative documentary films for free!“ Teachers will want to preview before you share with your class simply because of what “provocative” could mean. Most films are full length, but some are short. There is a helpful menu of topics on the right hand side of the computer screen. This menu makes it easy to navigate and find the type of documentary that is needed. Documentaries range from 9/11 and the London Bombing to The Road to Guantanamo to The Panama Deception to many others.
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This eclectic site has something for everyone about the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. For younger students, be sure to meet the mascots of the site, view the interactives, and more. Students of all ages can use this site to learn about the schedule, view photos and videos, learn about each sport in the winter 2010 Olympics, trace the torch relay, view a spectator guide, meet the athletes, view the interactive map, and more.
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If you are looking for a general informational site about the 2010 Olympics, this is the site for you! Learn about the sports (alpine skiing, curling, freestyle skiing, snowboarding, and more), view video clips, watch a countdown (with days, hours, minutes and seconds), and more. Be aware this site does include unobtrusive advertisements.
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Join the movement to urge citizens and lawmakers to take steps to reduce global CO2 levels to the number 350. Click on the "About" tab to learn the science, hear about the actions, and view media. Participate in activities such as "Days of Action." Register and sign up for email and text messages. Tip: rather than using your personal or work email, create a free Gmail account to use for memberships. If you plan to have students register individually, you may want to create your own Gmail account with up to 20 subaccounts for each group of students (by code name or number) within your classes. Here is a blog post that tells how to set up GMail subaccounts to use for any online membership service. Learn from people around the world about how they are spreading the word about climate change.
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Teachers First Edge Review: For adventurous MAC or Linux users with permission/ability to download software. Have fun and create four dimensional maps with chosen data. Choose data and view on a map that can be rotated, zoomed, and followed over time. Uuorld (pronounced "world") is a download application available for Mac OsX, Windows, and Linux. Uuorld is a free download but with some limitations. For example, the noncommercial (free) version has a maximum limit on data that can be exported to Google Earth. Any user can VIEW the gallery of Uuorld map images created by others and use them as a visual way to share data, no download necessary.
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Who is right when it comes to energy, its creation, and its use? Many of the issues are difficult to understand, and all sides are usually not heard. This site offers a great introductory animated presentation explaining many of the concepts and problems. Students hear the stories about industries, people affected, and the ways that our society contributes to energy problems. After sharing the initial presentation, scroll down the page to read and/or watch more about “Climate Refugees,” “Mining the Mountains,” “Debating Coal’s Future,” and several other topics. New topics are added frequently. And at the time of this review, this site was kept very up to date. Articles and resources offer different angles on energy issues. Look for articles that are all about the lives of all people, how energy works, energy issues of today, and the future of energy. The variety of topics at this site is great, as is the material. If you teach science, social studies, geography, or current events, don’t miss this site.
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This interactive graph (created with information from the U.S. Census) shows all jobs and the percentages of people who worked them from 1850-2000. Students can scroll up over any given year to see any job and the percentage of Americans working that job during that year (gender indicated). A few do have “missing data,” but most are complete. By clicking on the job, a new screen appears which shows the percentage of workers but divides the workers into male and female (pink and blue traditional colors help to differentiate between the genders). The site reflects the growing number of female workers, the loss of agrarian occupations, and the changing fields of importance, to name a few trends. Besides viewing the breakdown of male and female employees, you can also select one field and analyze its place in society today and during any given year. Occupations range from teachers to salesman to farmer to clerical worker and countless others. You can also search by letter and all the occupations beginning with that letter will come up graphed by percentages across the span of years.
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Follow the United States Olympic athletes at this interactive website. Find out current news about the athletes, read biographical information, read the athlete's blogs, watch video clips, explore the articles, and more. Click on "Resources" and then "U.S. Olympic Education" to find some lesson ideas to use in your classroom. There are some minor advertisements at this website.
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This collection of pdf lesson plans centers around 3 main topics: how we get our food, what the Fair Trade movement is doing for farmers and eaters, and what coops are. The complete curriculum is downloadable and printable, and the daily lessons at this site offer support and extra activities. One lesson, translated for Spanish teachers, offers students an activity so they can understand "What's Fair?" One of the most exciting parts of the website is a collection of videos of Dominican children talking in Spanish about cocoa production! The lesson plans include a variety of activities for students and include projects in math, writing, civics, research, geography, art, music, and international culture.
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This site offers an extremely detailed and well written lesson plan about the H1N1 (Swine Flu) virus. The lesson plan provides a wealth of background information for teachers, class activities for a variety of subject areas (podcasts, KWL charts, etc..), articles of interests, thinking questions, video clips, interactive graphics, blogs, and much more. This site is truly a web 2.0 lesson plan that is READY TO GO! Standards are provided. Although this lesson plan recommends 3-5 class periods, you could easily pick and choose what is best for your class.

*There is a link to a lesson plan specifically for younger students (grades 3-5). Specific activities and standards are provided for the younger grades at that link. This website requires Adobe Acrobat (pdf). You can get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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This site presents current news stories from multiple perspectives, featuring videos and commentary from the world's top newspapers. All the video news clips offer a complete transcript (click on "transcript" just below the video window). General topics covered include the U.S., the world, the environment, culture, technology, economy, and politics. Students can see short news clips, make comments blog style, and read news articles from newspapers around the world. Anyone can view the material, but you must register to be able to make comments. Check your school policies about accessing/sharing student email on school computers. You may want to create your own Gmail account with up to 20 subaccounts for each group of students (by code name or number) within your classes. Here is a blog post that tells how.
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Use this free site for finding the best information on the Internet. Enter the search term directly into the fields you wish. Refdesk provides many search engines to choose from. Use the dictionary and thesaurus, search literature, scan news, or read about articles, pictures, or headlines of the day. Refdesk provides one place to find an abundant amount of information at your fingertips. Students should be cautioned to not click on ads which are scattered throughout the site.
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This site is jam packed with current news stories that are chosen by site coordinators for the "tween" (age 8-14) audience. Middle school audiences will find the article easy to read, relate to, and understand. The site is easy to navigate with a subject indexed toolbar and it is searchable. There is even a "your town" section for local news stories. All stories are current because the creators scour the internet weekly for age appropriate material. It greatly reduces the pressure of searching by giving an article research tool that is much more specific than simply using a search engine.

If you want to allow your students to post a comment on a blog, they do need to register with the site. Registration requires a username and password (no email address). Visit the “For Teachers” link to learn more about the site and how to use and customize (free) for use with your classes safely and in compliance with federal laws.
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The potential spread of Swine Flu in schools and among young people is a major concern. TeachersFirst's editors have collected this helpful information for teachers, students, and parents to better understand the virus, how it is spread, and what YOU can do to stay healthy. This collection of resources has been hand-picked for accuracy and for age-appropriateness with students and so we may all participate in healthy prevention of the swine flu.
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This site presents economic facts in graphic form. Want to see a map of unemployment rates around the world? How about an illustrated pie chart of how the average US consumer spends money? Wasteful government "earmarks"? You will find these here and more. Possible bias alert! The creator of the site is an online credit and loan company, which may have a particular agenda in mind.
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Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center and seeks to provide educators with tools to reduce prejudice of all kinds. You might already be familiar with this group's "Mix it Up" initiative which seeks to get middle school and high school students to sit with someone new for one day during lunch at the cafeteria. This site contains lesson plans, links for teachers, parents, teens, and kids, current topics related to prejudice, an on-line version of the Teaching Tolerance magazine, an order form for free curriculum materials, and links to other resources.

The teacher’s link offers classroom activities (many interactive) that tie in with the lesson plans. There is also a link to receive FREE kits and handbooks! The “Parents” link offers activities and ideas for ages 2-17! There are online activities, recommended books, “talking points” for parents, and more. The “For Teens” link includes a wealth of resources: video clips, lessons, 10 steps to take action, downloadable posters, essays, and true stories. The Kid’s link offers “read,” “Explore,” and “Play” options for elementary (and younger middle school) students. A “sign up” box appears when you first enter the site, click on the X to remove the box.
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TeachersFirst Edge entry: for slightly adventurous technology users. So you want to meet with other teachers around the globe and your school can’t afford for you and your students to fly there? No problem. Sign up for free video conferencing through DimDim. For the free version of this web conferencing site, up to 20 conference attendees can communicate with each other. No downloads are needed. Power point presentations, graphs, pdf documents, plus more, can be shared via DimDim conferencing.

Warning—this is a commercial site, so upgrades on services are offered prominently. As with most high-tech sites, these upgrades to the premium levels are offered for a cost (DimDim Pro). DimDim Free is free. This site requires Adobe Acrobat and Flash. You can get both from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.
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