Nature of Science
The LeTaS! teachers found these books to be particularly helpful:
- Activities for Integrating Science and Mathematics
- AIMS: Sense-able Science
- AIMS: Water Precious Water
- GEMS: Sifting through Science
- The Essentials of Science K-6: Effective Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
- Zero to Einstein in 60
- Teaching Science with Everyday Things
Other helpful resources:
Exploratorium: The museum of science, art and human perception at the Palace of Fine Arts
From website “Online since 1993, the Exploratorium was one of the first science museums to build a site on the World Wide Web. Our site now contains over 18 thousand award-winning Web pages exploring hundreds of different topics. We currently serve 20 million visitors a year. That makes us one of the most visited museum Web sites in the world. Learn more about our Web site.”
Learn Physics Today and Other Science Fields
This site contains Learn Physics Today webpage. It also links to several other fields of science.
Newton BBS
This is from the about section of the webpage “The NEWTON BBS, operated by the Division of Educational Programs (DEP) of Argonne National Laboratory [Argonne, Illinois which is located about 40 km (25 miles) southwest of downtown Chicago]. NEWTON BBS was started in November of 1991 to provide K-12 science, math and computer teachers (and their students) a place to practice telecommunications, to retrieve useful information in a wide variety of subjects, to contact research scientists from all over the world and to open communications between classroom teachers. NEWTON is associated with the Argonne Community of Teachers (ACT) and operated by the staff at the Division of Educational Programs.”
This webpage covers the entire spectrum of science. The “ask a scientist” archive contains a wealth of questions and answers. One negative to the “ask a scientist” section is a lack of graphics to accompany the explanations. With thousands of questions and answers I highly recommend looking here for solutions to common questions that arise about every day science.
How Things Work Home Page
This page contains approximately 1500 questions and answers. The questions cover a wide spectrum of difficulty. As with many webpage’s the lack of graphics make some explanations a little more difficult to understand. There is also no general order to the questions on this webpage. All 1500 are listed on the same page, so you have to search through to find something relevant.
HowStuffWorks – Learn How Everything Works!
Provides simple answers to common science related questions. The use of graphics helps provide clearer answers. In general, however the answers tend to be rather elementary and others may not be completely accurate. Still this is a nice website to gain a rudimentary knowledge of a wide range of topics.
Virtual Middle School Library
Just found this site, it has ~50 links to other science sites
Wikipedia
For the most part I do not trust what I read in Wikipedia. However, in the region of science I have found it a useful steppingstone when searching for information on topics I am not familiar with. Often times I will find more frequently used terms for the topic I am searching for or a more reliable resource under the reference section of the wiki entry. I, however, will not use this as a reference nor will I allow it to be my only source of information on a topic.
Science NetLinks
This site contains a resource section with a large quantity of links to different science based websites that are categorized by difficulty and the sites are given short reviews.