http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/hotbox/atlas/

Expand Your Vocabulary and Feed the World!

Take your students to the wonderful website to help them build their vocabulary and work to end world hunger at the same time. While not a highly accessible site, the vocabulary word can be read aloud.

FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.

According to the website, FreeRice has two goals:

1. To provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. To help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

USA Today says,

“Feeling guilty about wasting time on computer solitaire? Join the growing guilt-free multitude at FreeRice.com, an online game with redeeming social value.”

School Library Journal says,

“A teacher of fourth and fifth graders on the Yurok Indian reservation in Klamath, CA, . . . emailed the WFP. ‘My students absolutely LOVE the FreeRice site. Almost daily they earn several thousand grains of rice!’ she wrote. ‘You cannot imagine the joy in my heart when I look out and see 25 kids doing vocabulary work and enjoying it.’”

I played on the website today and find it is really quite addictive! I enjoyed learning new vocabulary words and watching how many bowls of rice I could fill. I imagine many students will be motivated to keep going with the vocabulary just to see how many bowls they can fill! It would be easy for a teacher to create a goal for a minimum number of bowls or a competition in the classroom for who could fill the most bowls. You have got to play:)

Flash Card Maker

Love, love, love this tool! Flash Card Maker allows you to create flash cards, with graphics in just minutes. They can be printed out or used online. For use online, Click Speak easily read the text on the flash cards, and single switch access can be provided with any mouse click set up, if the mouse is left resting on the Next Card button when in Study mode. I easily created vocabulary flash cards for my daughter's English vocabulary test, with about 30 cards in about 15 minutes. It is simple to insert graphics for additional support for text as well. You can also search through thousands of already made flash card sets. I easily found a set of cards for the science unit, Force and Motion, that closely corresponded to our county's unit of study.