Planet Orange – Money Lessons for K-6 Students
by noreply@blogger.com (Mr. Byrne)
Planet Orange is a website developed by ING Direct for the purpose of helping elementary school students learn some basic money skills. Through a series of “missions” (games) to Planet Orange students gain or lose money. Students can design an avatar to represent themselves on their missions. The students gain invest or spend the money they gain to match their budgets and reach their goals.
Planet Orange offers teachers a series of lesson plans for students in grades K-7. The lessons are designed around student play in the Planet Orange environment. The highlight of the teacher section are two 65+ page activity books. The activity books include materials for pre-teaching important money-related vocabulary prior to having students go on Planet Orange missions. The activity books also include worksheets and lessons to build upon the student missions in Planet Orange.
Applications for Education
To use Planet Orange kids have to enter a parent’s email address so to use it in your classroom you will have to contact parents. That could be a good way to communicate with parents about what’s going on in your classroom. In the event that you can’t get students online to use Planet Orange, some of the lessons in the activity books could be used effectively without going online.
Vocab Ahead: Learning ACT and SAT vocab by video. Vocab Ahead also gives teachers the ability to create custom playlists of vocabulary videos. The playlists can be shared via email, a posted link on a blog, or by posting a vocabulary video widget on a blog or website.
Bubba Brain: Review games with AP and SAT vocabulary.
Flashcard Flash: A search engine that searches twenty-two different flashcard services including Flashcard DB, Quizlet, and Study Stack.
Using publishers ABC, NBC, Fox, AP, and AFP, mapeas maps the most representative video news around the world. View the map and click on the circles to see the video news. The larger the circle, the more recent the news video. Good for current events.
Wordia Brings Words to Life in Video
Wordia is a free visual, video dictionary. Wordia features a selection of user-submitted and professionally created videos explaining the meaning of a word. The videos focus on the everyday use of words while the text accompanying each video provides the dictionary definition of the word. The video below explains the word literacy.
Applications for Education
Wordia is now offering an education section of their service. Wordia Schools provides a private area for students to share videos that they have created for the vocabulary covered in your curriculum. Wordia Schools is free, you can take a tour and sign up here.
Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
Visuwords – Online Graphical Dictionary
Lexipedia – Webbed Word Connections
Snappy Words – A Visual Dictionary and Thesaurus
1. Planet Science: online interactive science games
2. BBC Climate Change: decision-making
3. Clim’way: create plans to reach climate goals
4. Web Earth Online: Coping with today’s environment as an animal
5. Earth Day Games
6. Recycle City
7. World Wildlife Fund: list of more games
8. Ecokids: collection of environmental games
9. Adventures of Vermi the Worm: vermicomposting and other waste management ideas
10. Environmental Education on the Internet: huge list of games
Games are great teaching and learning tools for any age. Here are some sources for tools to help you solve crossword puzzles and for creating them for your students–of any age!
Quick tools to help you solve crossword puzzles: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-quick-tools-cluein-solve-crossword-puzzles/
Create crosswords for your students:
www.crosswordpuzzlegames.com
www.edhelper.com/crosswords_free.htm
www. studystack.com
www.puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com
www.armoredpenguin.com/crossword
www.eclipsecrossword.com (interactive crosswords for the web)