News from the Curriculum Resource Center

Constitution Day will soon be here, and schools that offer Title 1 programs are required to recognize it.  It is a day to discuss and recognize the founding fathers of our country and we have great resources to help teachers do just that.  The Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database offers these linked suggestions for resources.  For materials at the CRC on the U. S. Consititution, click here.

Meet Ed, Ned, Ted and Bob the dust bunnies.  Author and illustrator Jan Thomas brings four very colorful fuzzballs to life in Rhyming Dust Bunnies. Published by Simon and Schuster under the Atheneum for Young Readers imprint, a four page activity is available on pdf. Our copy is available for checkout  at JUV T4579r in the Children’s Book Center in the hallway.

Visual Elements is an arts and science collaborative project supported by the Royal Society of Chemistry.  Each element has been artistically rendered and the site allows students to click around the Periodic Table of Elements and gather information.  Students learn about each element such as the discovery date, name origin, and a description.  Additional chemical data (e.g. source, uses, physical and chemical characteristics) are also available.

Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

The  Ohio Resource Center, an online site that hosts a  fabulous collection of standards-based best practices in mathematics, science, and reading for Ohio schools and universities, offers twenty-six online tutorial lessons designed to help students review high school mathematics topics. The topics are basic to student success in post-secondary science, computer science, and engineering courses.

Copyright is confusing.  Many perfectly legal uses of copyrighted material exist, but often materials aren’t used because of fear of the unknown.  On the other hand, complete disregard for copyright is foolish and potentially costly. Pre-service and new teachers, as well as the rest of us,  must get a handle on what is okay and what isn’t.  There is a great resource available on the WWW to help clarify copyright questions:  Teaching Copyright .