Good morning, how are you? I wanted to bring you Homeschool Resources: Animation Program, Fine Arts, Piano and John Stossel along with other resources this morning you can use not only when homeschooling but to enhance your children’s learning anytime.
Animation-ish is an easy-to-use, web-based animation program that inspires creativity, encourages creative thinking, boosts technical literacy, and teaches basic animation and graphic design concepts.
Museum of Fine Arts Boston– All grades, with parental supervision
Tour exhibit collection highlights at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston with this website.
When arriving at today’s link, browse through the following collections:
- Art of the Americas
- Art of Europe
- Art of Asia
- Art of Africa and Oceania
- Art of the Ancient World
- Contemporary Art
- Photography
- Prints and Drawings
- Musical Instruments
- David and Roberta Logie Department of Textile and Fashion Arts
- Jewelry
Each collection page provides a brief description of the gallery and a few images of artwork in the gallery. Click on any image of a highlight and then view all works in that collection. Each piece of artwork includes interesting background information about it. Use the arrows at the sides of the image to move through the items.
As always, be sure to review this website prior to allowing children to visit as some pieces of artwork may not be appropriate for young visitors.
Make musical learning enjoyable, simple, accessible, and affordable, with lifetime access for your entire household (up to 5 family members) to hundreds of piano lessons, downloadable music, theory games, and more
Free DVDs – Stossel in the Classroom– Grades 6 & up (middle school – college level), with parental supervision
A big THANK YOU to ClickScholar Nancy Hogan for recommending this website “Stossel in the classroom.” Sponsored by the Center for Independent Thought (a non-profit educational foundation) it has produced a free DVD each school year that is a compilation of John Stossel’s television programs and specials, along with a teacher guide with lesson plans and ideas for complementary activities. Though they have discontinued their DVDs to focus on streaming videos and other online content, you can still order some of their past editions, and they’re still 100% free, shipping included.
When you get to the site you’ll learn how to register (free) to get past edition DVDs, as well as an accompanying downloadable “Teacher’s Guide” containing lesson plans, activity suggestions, handouts, and vocabulary.
In addition to getting the free DVD and resources, you can use the menu at the top of the home page to watch streaming videos from Stossel on thought-provoking topics in the “Video Library”. These videos cover a variety of categories including business, college, consumer issues, healthcare, law, privacy, and more. You can also search the videos by subject including:
- Business
- Government
- Science
- Technology
- Economics
- Health
- Physical Education
- Personal Finance
- History
- and much more!
Again, all of this is provided for FREE – they simply request that you send them your feedback on the website and products to share with fellow teachers/educators.
Meet The Masters offers seven different artist tracks and three different age levels to suit your needs. Each track covers five different artists, or you can choose the seven-pack bundle to study all of the 35 art masters.
Rockalingua– Grades 2-12, with parental supervision
Kids can learn basic Spanish and vocabulary structure with free samples at this commercial website.
While this is a subscription website, there is a load of free content for visitors to use. It appears that this site is geared toward elementary-aged students, but the content can most certainly benefit the older student. When arriving at the website scroll down a bit to review the icons for:
- Videos
- Games
- Songs
- Worksheets
- Picture dictionaries
After your selection has been made browse through the page to locate available free content. For example, when we browsed the videos page we found free videos to learn:
- Greetings/Daily Routines
- Animals
- Colors and Numbers
- Parts of the Body
- Family Members
- Seasons
- Rooms of the House
Games included learning colors, numbers, parts of the body, and rooms of the house. There were loads of free songs with downloadable lyrics and images. Worksheet options included numbers and colors, animals, rooms of the house, transportation, parts of the body, and more. And don’t leave this site without checking out their blog for loads of teaching ideas.
The colorful images, witty songs and music, and fun games will make this site a great supplement to any Spanish language program.
Award-winning Maestro Classics is a classical music series written for the narrator and orchestra and uses fun stories and musical explanations designed to help your family cultivate a love of music through education and joyful performances.
Computer Science – Free Alice Computer Programming Software
This website offers “Alice” – free educational software from Carnegie Mellon University that teaches students computer programming in a visual, 3-D environment. It makes it easy to create animation for interactive games and videos and much more.
The description from the website best explains it:
“Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production-oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course.”
When you get to the site you can read the latest news and media coverage about Alice software and then click on the menu items that include:
- Downloads – Get Free downloads of the software designed specifically for middle school students and/or high school and college students that will allow you to get started learning computer programming in a fun and engaging way.
- All About Alice – Click on this item and a new page opens that explains how Alice works – and provides promotional videos you can watch to better understand how to get started.
- Teaching Materials – Alice provides instructional materials to support teachers and students in classrooms. Resources include textbooks, lessons, tests, and more that you can download and print out.
NOTE: Some of you may have heard about “Alice” in the context of media coverage about one of the developers, Randy Pausch. Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, died of pancreatic cancer on July 25th, 2008 at the age of 47, leaving behind his wife and three young children. He gained worldwide attention through an inspirational “Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” in which he recounted how he achieved his childhood dreams of becoming a football player, experiencing zero gravity, and developing Disneyland attractions. There are lessons in his last lecture for all of us.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
