South Amherst Middle School Library

 

TEACHER RESOURCES

A-L | M-Z | Clip Art | Art | Health & PE | Language Arts/English |Library | Mathematics | Music | Science | Social Studies | Special Education


 

    
Check these links for resources and other information to enhance lesson plans and create learning activities.

General A-L

The purpose of a ok Teachers Stuff.com is to provide educators and parents with resources to work with their students or children.  It contains resources for reading, math, science, online reference books, special needs children information, and freebies for teachers.
A to Z Teacher Stuff is a teacher-created site designed to help teachers find online resources more quickly and easily. Find lesson plans, thematic units, teacher tips, discussion forums for teachers, downloadable teaching materials, eBooks, printable worksheets and black lines, emergent reader books, themes, and more.
The About School education site will help students, teachers and parents succeed in all school subjects.
Arcademic Skill Builders are online educational games that offer a powerful approach to learning basic math, language arts, vocabulary, and thinking skills.
Active Learning Practices for Schools is a learning community of educators dedicated to the improvement of education.
Alphabet Soup contains thematic units, holiday units, games and activities for kids; teacher and parent resources; and crafts, humor and recipes for all! Includes plenty of free printable's!
The goal of America Writes for Kids is to promote literacy and creativity by introducing young readers, parents, teachers, and librarians to the work of "real, live" children's authors.
Authentic Assessment Toolbox is a how to hypertext on creating authentic tasks, rubrics and standards for measuring and improving student learning.
Awesome Library organizes 35,000 carefully reviewed resources, including the top 5 percent for teachers, students, parents, and librarians.
Basic Steps in the Research Process is part of the CRLS Research Guide. This guide also gives students tip sheets.
TeAchnology.com provides The Best on the Web for Teachers! It offers teachers FREE access to thousands of teacher resources, lesson plans, and rubrics.
The Brain Connection provides games in this category that are designed to exercise the process involved in attending to and remembering information.
Certificate Creator lets you create online certificates. You can also search through their templates and print them out for your students.
The Columbia Education Center contains over 600 quality K-12 lesson plans.
Computer Pals Across the World network has guided teachers, students and community members in the use of state-of-the art telecommunications technology for use in the global classroom, for twenty-five years.
The Creative Teacher site is a non-profit site financed by the author to help develop creative teaching and professional enthusiasm.
Cyberbee Learning helps integrate the Internet into the classroom with excellent online resources found at this site. Resources include: curriculum ideas, research tools, treasure hunts, web quests, web links, articles, and more.
Try Discipline by Design for a positive, well-managed classroom environment. Included are tips of eleven techniques to help you focus on a discipline program.
Discipline Help is a reference for handling over 117 misbehaviors at school and at home.
Dr. LeBeau's Home Page is a resource for teachers, students, and curious adults.
eSchool News is the K-12 decision makers' technology and internet newspaper.
Easy Test Maker is a free test making site for teachers. You can create multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer, and true and false questions. You can also edit your test at any time.
Ed Helper contains top education and teacher sites! Over 200 teacher sites are listed and ranked by traffic.
Education Hotlists link to online resources that science educators and enthusiasts may find useful.
The Education Index is an annotated guide to education related sites on the web.
Education Place is from from Houghton Mifflin Publishers. It offers help to both teachers and students.
Education World is the Educator's Best Friend. This resource includes: a search engine for educational Web sites only, a place where educators can find information without searching the entire Internet; original content, including lesson plans, practical information for educators, information on how to integrate technology in the classroom, and articles written by education experts; site reviews; daily features and columns; teacher and principal profiles; Wire Side Chats with the important names in education; and employment listings.

Teacher Tap provides the Educational Portals and Starting Points site contains links to general education portals, thematic starting points, along with subject area and grade level portals.

As a leading national center for teaching about conflict and social responsibility, Educators for Social Responsibility have been providing effective and credible resources for teaching important current issues for over 20 years. Their Online Teacher Center provides teaching resources on a range of issues related to international security, conflict resolution, peacemaking, violence prevention, and social responsibility.
The Educators Reference Desk site has great links for educators in the areas of counseling, general education, librarianship, family life, teaching, technology, subject areas, and more.
EduHound.com contains educational resources, lesson plans, clip art, worksheets, K-12 teacher web sites, homework, multimedia, technology tutorials, and an education newsletter.
Edutopia, from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, contains thousands of articles, videos, slide shows, expert interviews, blog entries, and other resources highlighting success stories in K-12 education.
4Teachers.org helps teachers teach with technology. Expand your curriculum with their timesaving educational resources that use technology to improve instruction across all content areas and grade levels.
4 2 explore provides definitions, activities, the 4 good starting points, and many more links and resources for each thematic topic.
Fact Monster, from Information Please, covers all types of information.
Federal Resources for Educational Excellence offers free resources from Federal agencies. It is a goldmine of information.

Middle Web's: The First Days of Middle School large amounts of information. Teachers will find at tips for discipline, classroom management, suggestions for the first days of school, downloadable forms and letters links, and more.

Funbrain contains games with an educational background.
Gateway to 21st Century Skills offers one-stop access to high quality lesson plans, curriculum units and other education resources on the internet.
Global SchoolNet offers online opportunities for teachers to collaborate including more than 750 online collaborative projects.
Good Character.com offers lessons and resources for teaching character education.
This is the grant section of the Ed.gov site. You can use topics to find education grants or keep up with existing ones.
Graphic.org contains a wide variety of graphic organizers with descriptions of each and tips on how and when to use them. You will also find samples along with strategies and links.

Graphic Organizers by SCORE

Graphic Organizers by SCORE contains a large selection of various graphic organizers including an Inter-action Outline, and Anticipation/Reaction Guide, Chain of Events, Compare and Contrast, and the usual Venn diagrams.
I Love That Teaching Idea inspires teachers with practical, teacher-created ideas and resources that can be used in the classroom immediately.
The Idea Box contains kids crafts, games, recipes, activities and more.
INFOhio Online Resources provides reliable databases for information & research, including newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, and more.
The mission of Inspiring Teachers is to empower beginning teachers and provide strategies to help them not just survive, but thrive in the classroom.
Kathy Schrock's site contains a categorized list of sites for educators with over 800 links including search engines, web quests and slide shows for computer training.
The K12 Station offers a free library featuring over 20,000 web-based resources for K-12 students, teachers and families. Just click on a grade level and topic to view dozens of sites with tutorials, games, movies, simulations, primary source documents, and more!
Kids.gov is the official kids' portal for the U.S. government. It links to over 2,000 web pages from government agencies, schools, and educational organizations, all geared to the learning level and interest of kids.

Knowitall.org is ETV's educational Web portal, a collection of fun, interactive web sites for K-12 students, teachers and parents.

The Knowledge Loom is a place for educators worldwide to do the following: review research that identifies promising practices related to various themes, view stories about the practices in real schools/districts, learn to replicate the success of these practices in your own organization, add your own stories and knowledge to the collections, and discover supporting organizations and resources, including annotated Web links.

Landmarks for Schools is dedicated to the idea that the very nature of information is changing, practically before our eyes. It is changing in what it looks like, where we find it, what we look at to view it, what we can do with it, and how we communicate it. Here you will find information and tools designed to help us redefine literacy for the 21st Century.
Learning Page provides a huge collection of professionally produced instructional materials you can download and print. Lesson plans, books, worksheets, and much more can be found here.
Lesson Planz.com is a searchable directory of free online lesson plans and lesson plan resources for all grades and subjects.

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GENERAL M-Z

McRel contains hot links for educators organized by subject area.  Within each subject area are a lesson plan library and related resources .

Middle School Do's & Don'ts are helpful whether starting your year as a beginning teacher or returning as a veteran educator. Try the tips here for excellent pointers on creating a valuable and successful middle school learning experience.

MIKIDS.com contains all kinds of computer lessons for grades K-8.

My Teacher Tools is a comprehensive directory of Teaching Tools. It is the product of years of research by Rona Martin, classroom teacher and community volunteer.

National Geographic for teachers provides many links to quality educational materials.

Find unique teaching tips written in "My teachers" on Dr. Kathie Nunley's web site for educators.

Kent State produced this list by grade level of academic content standards.

Ohio Department of Education

This is the Ohio Department of Education web site.

OPLIN is the web site of the Ohio Public Library Information Network.

ORC enhances teaching and learning by promoting standards-based best practices in mathematics, science, and reading for Ohio schools and universities. ORC serves as a trusted source of easily accessible, peer-reviewed, high-quality, and effective resources.

The Ohio Treasure Chest is an online collection of thousands of web sites which are high-quality, teacher-reviewed, interactive, and free. Each web site is aligned directly to the Ohio Academic Content Standards in math, science, language arts, and social studies, and ready for use in your classroom.

PBS Teacher Source offers free resources for teaching and learning, local resources and services, professional development, and PBS video products.

Performance Education offers free lesson plans in the social studies area.

Personal Educational Press lets you create free educational worksheets such as flashcards, game boards, and quizzes to print directly from your browser.

Pro Teacher contains a directory that covers all of the major educational areas.

Puzzlemaker allows you to create your own puzzles and games for your class assignments.

Horace Mann and nationally recognized teacher, Alan Haskvitz, developed this site, Reach Every Child, of educational resources for teachers and students. It includes lesson plans to make reaching students and using technology easier.

RIF is the nation's largest children's literacy organization.

Rubistar allows you to create your own rubric or view examples at this site. The site also contains rubrics in Spanish.

Rubrics and Evaluation Resources allows you to view general rubric templates as well as rubrics for multimedia projects. Other links will give you bookmark management tips, critical thinking resources, etc.

At Secondary Assessment Tools you will find all kinds of product, process, and reading/writing assessments. Create your own assessment or look at other links for topics such as ESL assessment.

The Secondary School Educators Page is from About.com This site offers information on lesson plans, educational issues, teaching strategies and much more.

Sites for Teachers contains lesson plans, worksheets, activities, clip art and more.

Smithsonian Education was developed for educators. It provides lesson plans, resources, a media catalog, field trips and more.

Find a handy reference here with national standards, or select your state for standards in each subject area.

Student Portfolios: Classroom Assessment provides information on student portfolios. A portfolio may be a folder containing a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay, evolving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision.

The mission of Super Thinkers "is to inspire creative problem solving, critical thinking, deductive reasoning, and logic.”  This fun and challenging site is targeted for students in grades 5 through 8.

Teacher Files is a source of free educational resources for teachers to use in their classrooms. The pages are full of resources, ideas, clip art, activities and lesson plans.

Teacher Recommended Websites is a goldmine of teacher recommended web sites and resources. The site is from the River Trails School District in Mt. Prospect, Illinois.

Teacher's Corner offers printable worksheets covering puzzles, brain teasers, word searches, word scrambles, match-up worksheets, crossword puzzle maker, telling time worksheets, money worksheets and printable calendars.

Teachers.Net offers over 150 unique "channels" for teachers by grade level, curriculum, region, and dozens of special interest groups.

Teachnet.com provides lesson plans, how to projects, and power tools for education. You can also sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter.

TeAch-nology is a web portal for educators that includes reviews of sites, teacher worksheets, downloads, rubrics and other teacher tools. You can also request a teacher newsletter delivered by email.

For 11 years Teachers @ Work have been supplying educators around the world with free, high quality resources to make life easier in a digital world.

Tech Trekers is a great site for teachers. It includes sites from early elementary to high school, free stuff for teachers, history, math, and science sites, simulation sites, scavenger hunts, thematic units, virtual field trips, web quests, Power Point ideas, rubrics, and web page tools.

Thinkfinity.org is the cornerstone of Verizon Foundation's literacy, education and technology initiatives. The Thinkfinity Search Engine provides access to all of the educational resources created by the Thinkfinity partners, plus partner reviewed materials.

The United States Department of Education Webster offers information on government programs including "No Child Left Behind".

Virtual Tours is a collection of tours of the world, museums, exhibits, points of special interest and the U.S. Government.

The concept of WVIZ Ideastream is to bring together a variety of educational and public service media programs to leverage creative, technical and financial assets to better serve our communities.

Warm Ups contains a large list of improv games for your students to loosen up in any situation, work cooperatively, or use as icebreakers.

Web Poster Wizard is a FREE tool that allows educators to create a lesson, worksheet, or class page and immediately publish it online. Teachers can also set up classes and assign projects to students. Students complete the assignments by creating their own online projects or reports. Teachers and students can even add images and links to their pages.

Write Design has produced a great site that shows how to apply graphic organizers to the classroom.

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Clip Art

Student Drawn Clip Art

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Art

Artcyclopedia is the fine arts search engine. It allows you to search over 80,000 images by 7,500 artists, browse by artist, movement, medium, nationality or name.
Artsy Fartsy lets children play, learn and create with art and music. The site includes a timeline of art periods.
Artsweb.com from the State of Florida offers teachers lesson plans and links to other art web sites.
The Alphabet of Art explains, in simple terms, the elements of visual design. Once you understand the Alphabet, you will be able to "read" pictures and other works of visual art and understand why they work the way they do.
A lifetimeofcolor.com provides educators with a comprehensive resource of lesson plans, projects and techniques for teachers and educators!
A.Pintura, Art Detective, an interactive mystery, allows students to solve an art mystery as well as learn about six famous artists.
The Incredible Art Department has art lessons from grades Pre K-12, the art site of the week, art news, art stuff, and much more. It is a comprehensive site.
The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum offers wonderful exhibits and includes activities for children. Online teacher resources are listed and the museum lends slide packets, videos, and lesson plans at no charge.

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Health & Physical Education

Balance First is a health and physical fitness program
PE Central is the web site for health and physical education. Here you will find lesson ideas and other links for physical education and health.
Physical Education Update.com is the web site for physical educators who must know a little bit about everything related to sports, health, fitness and physical education...but don't have the time to stay up-to-date.
This is the health, physical activity, fitness and sports information web site of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
Sports Rules is intended to be a concise reference guide, containing easy to understand explanations of the rules and guidelines of many sports.
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Language Arts

Book Report Ideas offers dozens of ideas for exciting, hands-on literary projects.
Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics.
Children's Literature Web Guides is a listing of Internet resources related to books for children and young adults.
The Database of Award Winning Children's Literature allows you to search for award-winning children's books (K-12) by age of reader, genre, time period, and more.
The mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to excite and inspire the world's children to become members of the global community – children who understand the value of tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online. They have over 324 free children's books online.

The Language Arts Curriculum Resource and Guide is specifically written for middle school English teachers—a huge resource for implementing and maintaining an effective instruction strategy.

At Learning with Mysteries you will find lesson plans and resources for using mysteries to teach critical thinking, writing, and literature. For grades 7-12.
Linda's Links to Literature contains links to other reading resources.
Millennium Mystery Madness is the site where you can find facts from the early years of mystery to the present, the history of mystery, and a mystery scavenger hunt.
More Ideas Than You'll Ever Use for Book Reports contains a large collection of book report ideas.
Spotlight on Poetry contains lots of ideas for poetry lessons. The site was developed by a teacher.
Reading A-Z's downloadable books, lessons, worksheets and other resources are designed for use in various reading settings from whole class to small group to individual work whether with core, ESOL, special education, RI (Response to Intervention), bilingual and other such programs. All materials are research-based, standards-based, and results oriented.
Reading-Tutors.com resource packets are organized into six instructional categories. Each category addresses skills and strategies that reading experts have defined as keys to developing successful readers

ReadWriteThink is a partnership between the International Reading Association (IRA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Verizon Foundation. They are working together to provide educators and students with access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction through free, Internet-based content.

Visuwords is an online graphical dictionary where you can look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts.
Vocabulary A-Z.com allows you to build vocabulary lessons.
Wacky Web Tales is a creative and interactive site are for kids, in grades 3 and above who love Mad Libs. Students can pick from one of over 20 different tales and fill in the requested parts of speech. They can then see how their answers were used to create a really wacky story.
Web English Teacher presents the best of K-12 English/Language Arts teaching resources: lesson plans, Web Quests, videos, biography, e-texts, criticism, jokes, puzzles, and classroom activities.
Writing a-z.com empowers teachers with instant access 24/7 to hundreds of leveled, downloadable writing resources.

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Library

Advanced Book Exchange allows you to request a book or out of print book, have them make a search, and receive a price quote.
ALA Great Web Sites for Kids has excellent web sites that are recommended by the ALA including links to the Caldecott Medal, the Newbery Medal and other literature sites.
Book Finder.com is a meta search engine for finding new, used, or out of print books.
Book Hive from the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina is your guide to children's literature and books.
Booktalk Resources offers links to great sites dealing with book talks.
The Educator's Reference Desk has great links for educators in the areas of counseling, general education, family life, teaching, technology, subject areas, and more.
The Internet Public Library offers resources on all the major subject areas for students, parents and teachers.
At Librarians @ Random you will find book talks, booklists, awards, information on authors, illustrators and more.
Look at U.S. history and culture, world culture and resources, legislative information, exhibitions, and more at the Library of Congress site.
Nancy Keane's Booktalks Quick and Simple offers lists of book talks from preschool through young adult.

The Read Across America site contains activities promoting reading.

SOS for Information Literacy is a virtual idea factory dedicated to helping educators find motivating ways of teaching information literacy skills to children.

The Student Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism is an easy to read document that kids can read.

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Math

AAA Math features a comprehensive set of interactive arithmetic lessons. Unlimited practice is available on each topic which allows thorough mastery of the concepts.
A Plus Math was developed to help students improve their math skills interactively.
AMaths Dictionary for Kids is an animated, interactive dictionary for students which explains over 600 common mathematical terms in simple language.
Cool math 4 kids is an amusement park of math and more - especially designed for fun, fun, FUN.
At Education World: Math Lessons you will find math lesson plans and more.
Educators Reference Desk offers more math lesson plans.
Illuminations is sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Here you can explore math and create interactive lessons.
Sponsored by Drexel University, The Math Forum is one of the best, most complete sources for math materials and resources on the Internet. It covers Grades K-12 and beyond.

Math Links

At Math Links you will find math resources, study guides, strategies, web quests, and much more.
The goal of Math Stories is to help elementary school (Grade 1st through 6th) children boost their math problem solving and critical-thinking skills. MathStories.com has over 15,000 online and printable NCTM compliant math word problems for children to enjoy!
This site contains math activities and games for teachers to use in their classroom.  Design your own quizzes, worksheets, and flash cards.

The National Library of Virtual Manipulative's for Interactive Mathematics has been made available by Utah State University. They have made dozens of free PreK-12 math manipulative's available online. These applications help students visualize complex relationships and increase their understanding of everything from addition to Venn diagrams and beyond.

Professor Freedman's Math Help is for students who may experience problems with math.  There are note taking tips, study skill tips, ways to reduce anxiety, and tutorials for students.

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Music

Artsy Fartsy Music Appreciation is a site for kids to learn about composers and how to read music.
Creatingmusic.com is a children's online creative music environment for children of all ages. It's a place for kids to compose music, play with musical performance, music games and music puzzles
At Incompetech.com you will find royalty free music connections.
The Music Genre Sampler will take you on a tour of some of the more popular musical genres by first giving a general overview and then by listing well-known musicians and a sound sample.

The Library of Congress presents thePatriotic Melodies site which tells the stories behind many of the songs that have now become part of the American national heritage.

Play Music.org introduces students to the instruments of the orchestra.
At the Science of Music site students can create music using ordinary objects, hands, and feet, sound riddles of sound and more.
The San Francisco Symphony Kids site in conjunction with our live performances, provides a great way for people of all ages to hear, learn, and have fun with music.
Songs for Teaching offers thousands of song lyrics, sound clips and teaching suggestions.

Songs 4 Teachers contains more than 125 Free songs and poems to use with children. 

 

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Science

At BJ's Science site you will find science fair project ideas, science resources, study guides and strategies, web quests, and much more.
The Bugscope project is an educational outreach program for K-12 classrooms. The project provides a resource to classrooms so that they many remotely operate a scanning electron microscope to image "bugs" at high magnification.
The Education World Science site contains science lesson plans and more.
Integrated Science Units has nine instructional modules designed specifically by classroom teachers to teach science and math in integrated units centering around life-relevant themes. Eight of the units are designed for students in grades 4-6 and one is designed for high school students.
The stories and activities that comprise each unit in Maggie's Earth Adventures are presented to introduce students to actual environmental issues and to motivate students to delve deeper into the issues presented.
At The Mystery Spot you will find a series of science mysteries. You must listen to all the symptoms and advise a diagnosis.
National Geographic Education offers lesson plans, educational materials and interactive features.
Find an extensive collection of science web sites and lessons categorized by subject and grade levels at Science Net Links.
The TryScience project team at the New York Hall of Science provides project management, content and collaboration management, technical and graphics management, and writing, editing, and research management for this multi dimensional site.
At Weather Eye you will find all kinds of weather information including lesson plans, activities, and experiments.

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Social Studies

The Civil War offers an extensive listing of Civil War topics, which include quizzes, reading lessons, and activities.
Computer Pals Across the World (CPAW) is a non-profit global educational electronic network.
Graphic Maps offers outline maps of countries as well as images of flags, continents, globe, USA and more.
Geography Hotlists is a treasure of geography links that include time zones, flags of the world, cultural US history maps, rare maps, geographic dictionary, maps from around the world, teacher resources and much more.
History - It's Happening! is an EBSCO Publishing database that contains primary source documents, speeches, and selected articles on notable figures from Canada and the US, historic video footage, web sites related to history, and teacher guides.
The Library of Congress site lets you look at US history and culture, world culture and resources, legislative information, exhibitions, and more. It also includes The Learning Pages which offers a teacher's eye view of over 7 million historical documents, photographs, maps, films, and audio recordings. You will find lessons, features, activities, and tips and tricks for using these collections in your classroom.
This Monthly Holidays & Celebrations page is from Sue LeBeau, it has links to holidays for every month and almost every day of the year.
National Geographic Education offers lesson plans, educational materials and interactive features.
National Geographic Xpeditions is another site for teachers that features lesson plans, an atlas of printable outline maps, standards, and other activities.
The Our Documents site offers documents that were an important part of our past. Classroom activities are also given.
Smithsonian Education is a resource directed at teachers, parents, and students. Nearly 1,000 resources are offered including free lesson plans, field trips, and interactive learning labs, all searchable by grade level and subject.
Travel Pod produced this great geography game that works well using a SMARTBoard.

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Special Education

Special Education on About.com offers many links and articles regarding special education with new links and articles frequently being updated.
The Center for Implementing Technology in Education site supports school districts in using technology to provide differentiating instruction through the Technology Implementation Partnership.
The Idea & Research for Inclusive Settings site, developed by Peabody University and Vanderbilt University with funding from the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs, provides modules with specific information in differentiated instruction, classroom and behavior management, accommodations, collaboration, disabilities, diversity, and transition.
Inclusive Schools , sponsored by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement, contains information about inclusion in the classroom.
The Inclusive Science & Special Education Needs site aims to facilitate the sharing of good practice and ideas relating science education for students with special education needs.
Misunderstood Minds from PBS offers a variety of simulation activities that allow students to learn about disabilities in attention reading, math, writing, and also has resources.
Project Inspire developed by Texas Woman's University has a wealth of information regarding adapted physical education. It provides concise fact sheets regarding typical behaviors associated with a number of disabilities, program modification suggestions, and internet links.
The RISE (Resources in Special Education) web site is designed to provide online resources, support, and answers to the questions, challenges, and issues teacher education students face when educating and working with students with special needs.
Teachers First is provided by e-ready. The site provides teachers and other education professionals with information and resources about gifted students as well as teaching students with disabilities.

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Updated: April 27, 2010