School And Work At Home

Many of us have been working at home for months now and it may be time to invest in a small desk or office chair.  I myself have been starting to feel like I am showing an arch in my back from leaning over to look at my laptop.  You may want to consider a small desk for your children also if they will be spending an extended period of time completing school online this year.  I just purchased a relatively inexpensive desk on Amazon  for my middle school child. For the price it was pretty sturdy, just took some time to put together. I recently purchased the Atlantic Gaming Desk  for one of my middle school children pictured above.  Last school year sitting at the kitchen table was not not working well.  I have room in the house to set this up in a spare bedroom so there is some quite space.  The desk was pretty easy to set up, but the instructions are pretty sparse.  Just make sure you double check the photo that comes in the box as a guide.  I like there are metal legs as I am picturi

Mango is a language learning resource for individuals and organizations around the world. An all in one solution that combines quality content, intelligent technology, and an adaptive algorithm that delivers practical phrases from real situations. Mango hosts over 70 world languages and dialects through courses crafted using conversational methodology. Self-paced language courses introduce the learner to cultural insights and grammatical nuances specific to their language of choice, delivered through native speaker dialogue, and created with each individual learner in mind. Mango Classroom allows teachers to upload student lists and organize classes to track progress, follow engagement, and review automatically graded assessments.  Due to COVID-19 throughout our communities and most vulnerable populations, Mango Classroom is being offered freely to all schools facing closures through the end of the 2019-2020 school year. For administrators and language teachers, Mango Classroom off

Elementari is a simple tool for all ages that combines writing and coding. Students can begin with simple picture books and then 'code' their stories to play music, voiceovers, animations, and more. Elementari is an online platform that connects artists with writers to create and share interactive stories. They have over 10,000 illustrations and sounds with more added each week by the community to jump-start your story. Creating student accounts makes it easy to join in without an email and jumpstart writing. If your students already addresses or google for education accounts, they can simply sign up themselves and join with the classcode. Provide specific page to page feedback on ongoing stories. Once you give feedback on a student's story, he will be able to review, make changes, and resolve that feedback directly within the authoring tool. Afterwards, you can validate that the feedback has been resolved properly before publishing the story to the public. Each classroom h

Scholastic has launched a  “Learn at Home” website  that has daily courses for students from Pre-kindergarten to grades 6 and higher. This free resource provides children with about 20 days of articles and stories, videos, and fun learning challenges. Children can complete them anytime, in any order. They can work on their own or together with you and your family. Active learning is available on any device and will provide childen with up to three hours’ worth of exciting learning experiences per day. They can go on virtual field trips, meet best-selling authors, or dig deep into a topic they love. Here is an example day for grades 6+ Day 1 Meet a teen changing how the world views disabilities in  “Celebrating Differences.” Plus: Check out  how these artists make clothes that camouflage. Think about it:  What's the future of zoos? Discover  how your favorite emoji was made.

When you are home schooling or if the kids are just home for an extended period of time and need to keep up their skills, it is not always easy to make up worksheets.  This is especially more difficult as the kids are older.  One great resource is Scholastic which has a site full of  printables, lessons, mini books, clipart, and other teacher resources.  The website offers a 30 day free trial.  For some of you this may be enough to get you thru the summer or just allow you to get a few extra sheets to help supplement regular school work.  As of today, the annual plan was on sale for only $2.49 a month or $29.99 a year which is half off. For military and DoD civilians there is a great way to get all of this for free.  The MWR Library program offers free access to the site.  You just need to log in via one of the MWR Library sites.  Here is the information below for the MWR sites: Who is authorized to use the MWR Digital Library?  Active duty, retired, and Reservist members and t