Find all the practical information you need in preparing your science, nutrition, and health lessons using the government's food plate recommendations for daily eating. Nutrition for a healthy lifestyle is one of the most important pieces of information of education for our students. Early interest, information, and healthy habits will carry them into a life of good health. Find the basic information about nutrition, exercise, and diet. The interactive program and multimedia presentations pique interest of even the most picky eaters and learners! A variety of printed information is available for student research, parent education, or even a problem based learning activity. The First Lady's campaign of Let's Move is also explained. At ChooseMyPlate.gov, you will find the latest guidelines, recommendations, and recipes. Learn the basic information about the food groups and options in each group. There are food planners for moms, tots, kids, or any age. Find nutritional information on vegetarian diets, eating out, and food trackers. A section with interactive tools provides a Foodapedia, A Daily Food Plan, Food Tracker, and a Child cost calculator providing even more helpful nutritious information. Weight loss information provides all kinds of up to date ideas, plans, and tips.

In the Classroom

Dietary guidelines can be a help to all teachers, faculty, and staff. Challenge students to track their food and physical activity. Plan meals to bring you perfect health. Plan a nutrition day in which every student shares some aspect of this site in a presentation with other classes and parents. Have students make a multimedia presentation using one of the many TeachersFirst Edge tools reviewed here. Evaluate the cafeteria lunches to bring even more fun into your recipe! Add an international portion with your students' multicultural recipes to add to make your own cookbook, or website. Be sure to add this link to your own site.

Virtual Swim offers a three dimensional approach to swimming body movements. From butterfly to freestyle, this module offers swimming animations of real Olympic swimmers at different speeds and different angles. The site is extremely valuable and fun to manipulate with the animations provided! This offers a great real world connection to the universe of physics. This could be great for swimming coaches and physical education teachers alike. STudents more interested in athletics than science might be hooked into studying principles of motion through these animations.

While the site offers custom animation for FREE, there is a cost if you choose to send in a video of yourself swimming both above and below the water surface. Depending how involved you become with using this site, this is not at all necessary, but it is an option.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

Share this site on your projector or interactive whiteboard. Try using this tool in your physics class to analyze motion, to reinforce Newton's Laws, and to explore Bernoulli's principle. Divide your class into teams and have them swim to the head of the class by assigning each group a different stroke and have them explain how the stroke demonstrates Newton's first and third law. Assist students in gathering numerical data to calculate force using Newton's second law. On a more simple level, when using this website in physical education, use the site to demonstrate the proper form for each of the strokes available on the site. Have students share the science of motion in their sport of interest. Fr example, what do runners do to minimize wind resistance at the start of a race?

Produce Oasis is a source for information about selecting and preparing herbs, fresh fruits & vegetables. The site includes healthy recipes, seasonal information, history, and nutritional & dietary data about your favorite fruits and vegetables! To explore the site, choose from one of the categories offered: fruits, vegetables, recipes, and more. One unique area is the produce nutrition section; click this button and choose a vitamin or mineral from the list to find the daily recommended allowance. It also provides lists of fruits and vegetables and their percentage of the daily allowance in a serving. The Tip of the Day section offers a daily tip on vegetables or fruits that are high in nutrition and includes archives of past tips.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

During a unit on healthy eating, challenge your students to create a web exhibit collection about the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables using a tool such as Bag The Web (reviewed here) to share all of the important links, information, and even brief descriptions. Use the site with students to create healthy menus and find alternatives to fast foods. If you are a family and consumer science teacher, try out some of the recipes in class! Have students choose a recipe and create a "how-to" video to share with the class. Share the videos using a tool such as SchoolTube reviewed here.

Utubersity presents the best educational videos available on YouTube in an organized, easy to find way to watch and learn. The site can be searched in several ways. The home page offers choices of newest, popular, and featured videos. At the top of the page, you can choose from the categories of lectures, documentaries, or conferences. More specific categories of lecture topics are included on the left of the home page, here you can narrow down searches to areas such as geography, sports, education, biology, economy, and much more. If searching for something more specific, type your query in the search bar to find included results. Over 18,000 videos are available with more being added all the time, making this site worth bookmarking for future use. If YouTube is not accessible in your school, you could always view that at home and bring them to class "on a stick" to share. Use a tool such as KeepVid reviewed here to download the videos from YouTube.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

Use this site as a resource for videos to use in the classroom. Have art students use Screenr (reviewed here) to make narrated recordings about videos that they find on this site. Share this site with gifted students who are delving deeper into topics than your current curriculum allows. This is a great site to share on your class blog, wiki, or website for students to use for extra practice or advancement.

Encourage students to get sixty minutes of exercise daily by partnering school workers with this site's two sponsors: the Department of Agriculture and the National Football League. You can join the program for free and see if your school qualifies to receive grants to help educate your students about exercise, nutrition, and healthy eating and also to increase student access to more physical education programs and better foods. Check with your school administrators to be sure it is acceptable to have your school join and to allow your students to individually register. "Quick Start Resources" help you learn how to use the program and set up their class as a team.

In the Classroom

Participate in the healthy eating challenge by creating your own class video entry for the Cooking Show Challenge! Share the videos using a tool such as Teachers.TV reviewed here. Help your class members to apply to be student ambassadors. Help your students to sign up and start graphing their physical activity and nutritional changes, receive badges and prizes, see how their classmates are doing and encourage them by giving rewards, and finally, by viewing what other classes are doing. Share the information on this site with parents so they can support the lifestyle changes encouraged here at home.

Find inspiring, age-appropriate, real-life stories, videos, and projects to share with the children and teens. The site hopes to help these students take positive actions and become the best people they can be. Stories offer great examples of values like courage, determination, honesty, humility, kindness, responsibility, and tolerance. The stories range from incredible kids inspiring other kids, to amazing animals demonstrating admirable qualities, to the invention of inspirational social causes. Stories are searchable in several ways - by values, topics, age range, and format. Formats include articles, podcasts, reference, and videos. You can also sign up for the site's newsletter including updates and new article information.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

Share stories from the site on your interactive whiteboard or projector when learning about character traits such as sportsmanship, perseverance, and responsibility. Use the site as a resource when problems arise in the classroom such as bullying, intolerance, or special needs awareness. Have students use resources from the website as models for writing their own articles or creating a podcast. Use a site such as PodOmatic (reviewed here). Use the stories as models for writing activities and essays. Your students could also draw inspiration from this site to create values comics using one of many comic creation tools in this TeachersFirst collection.

Create a podcast using audio and videos clips featuring NASA scientists! Follow the steps to create the podcast, including writing a production script, downloading clips, recording your narrations, and editing. Use a digital recorder, camcorder, or your computer to record the audio. Download a brochure or bookmark to remember the links for creating the DIY Podcast. Click on the links along the right side of the page for great resources such as the DIY Podcast Blog for some great ideas. Several examples along the side include creating a fitness podcast, lab safety, Newton's Laws, Rocket Science, and Solar Arrays.

In the Classroom

Provide example topics to your class once they have tried this site, and let them go! Podcasts can be used in any subject area. In math, have students "teach" the class a new skill via podcast. Rather than a traditional book report, have students create a podcast highlighting the main character, plot, conflict, or storyline or a book. In current events, have cooperative learning groups create a podcast debating a current area of dispute. You could record your assignments or directions; you can record story time or a reading excerpt for younger ones to listen to at a computer center AND from home! Have better readers record selected passages for your non-readers (perhaps older buddies). Launch a service project for your fifth or sixth graders to record stories for the kindergarten to use in their reading and listening center. Have your Shakespeare students record a soliloquy! Write and record a poem for Father's or Mother's Day (or other special events) and send the URL as a gift to that special person. Create great podcasts that can be shared on your wiki site, or blog!

In the Classroom

Build student literacy skills, reinforce what students are learning about health, and help students build the important reading strategy of connecting what they read to prior (classroom!) knowledge. Share this link on your class web page or wiki so students can select independent reading books to accompany your unit on health. Don't forget to share the list with the school and local libraries so they can bring in some of the books on interlibrary loan. CurriConnects are a great help for teachers who have lost school library/media specialists due to budget cuts.

This site has embedded videos from over 1600 documentaries located all over the internet. These videos are not necessarily "short" clips. Some are longer than 15 minutes. Search the videos via several methods: browse the library, most popular, recent videos, or by categories. The categories vary greatly and include the bullying of those with disabilities, 9/11, aftermath of the Japan Tsunami, import and export of oil, and countless other topics. Each video comes with a short explanation and ratings (out of 10 stars). Viewers can also leave their own rating. Many include suggestions for related videos. Be aware: some of topics may not be suitable for the classroom. Please preview before (or IF) you choose to allow students to peruse on their own. You may want to share only specific videos with the class. It has been noted that this website opens rather slowly at the busy times of the day. But it is WELL worth the wait. Note that videos are recommended for inclusion by the video creators, so there could be very strong bias in documentary presentations. What better way to challenge students to stop and ask, "What is the source of this information and can I trust it fully?"This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

View videos on your interactive whiteboard or projector to correspond with classroom lessons. Be sure to discuss the source and possible bias of any documentary. "Documentary" does not necessarily mean "trustworthy" or "unbiased"! Link to specific videos on your classroom computer, website, or blog for students to view on their own. Assign different topics and allow students to choose a documentary to use as part of their research. Have students make a multimedia presentation using one of the many TeachersFirst Edge tools reviewed here.

This lesson plan about engineering bones uses inexpensive materials and is engaging for students to complete. Beyond teaching about biology and health, this can also help students understand some of the problems with being disabled, especially disabled people who have lost limbs in the armed services or through tragic accidents. While teaching science concepts or health topics, students are developing a greater awareness and appreciation for differences in people.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

Try using this lesson plan as part of a health unit on accidents and amputations. Or, in biology class talk about the mechanics of the muscles in the leg and the advances that medicine has taken to help create better prosthetic devices. Link scientific inquiry to "real" problems. Consider inviting a guest who works with amputees to meet with your class via Skype as part of this lesson.

This would also make a great extension activity for those students who love science and work well independently. Gifted students would enjoy the challenges of this very complete lesson package. If your school participates in a science fair, this would be an ideal project. Thinking about an after school science club? This would be a perfect activity to engage both male and female middle schoolers.

As teachers, we often look for ways to help students sift through the enormous amount of information on the Internet, and to help them discriminate among those that are reliable and those that are not. The site "Coal Cares" might be a wonderful tool to use in this effort.
First, coalcares.org is a spoof, a site purposely written to deceive. Although it looks perfectly legitimate on the surface--professionally created, and full of "facts"--a close reading of it soon reveals that it is designed to make fun of sites which try to put a positive spin on a negative issue.

In the Classroom

Consider using this site to teach students to read carefully and evaluate the claims made on websites. You might divide the class into teams and have each group examine one of the page links from the site. One link provides paper and pencil games for kids. What can they find in these games that is ironic or reveals that the site is a spoof? (Hint: look for words in the word search that are not listed in the word bank!). Another link offers free inhalers for kids. Where do the links lead? Do students find anything strange about "baby's first inhaler"?

After students have dissected the site and discovered all the misleading statements and "propaganda," encourage them to read the blog post at Coal Cares Site a Brilliant Hoax, reviewed here, for more information about the hoax, and how it was devised. Then, discuss the implications of this example. How can it make them better internet consumers? Challenge groups to create multimedia projects sharing their finding. Have students use one of the many TeachersFirst Edge tools reviewed here.

Are your students frustrated with issues and problems of today? Wish to create a more enlightened and responsible generation? Use the resources at Take Part to bring issues and possibilities to light. Search issues by category, read news stories, find actions and communities, and even create communities and actions. Read the must read of the week and view important facts and ideas. View video clips, read articles, and more. Join the community though this is not necessary to use the resources.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

Non-fiction reading and background knowledge have found a new emphasis with The Common Core State Standards. It is more important now than ever to help connect students with quality non-fiction reading material and viewing material. Find great resources, actions, and possibilities for many of the best documentaries students can view such as "Inconvenient Truth" and "Food, Inc." Be sure to check out the lesson plans available at this site.

Global Handwashing Day (GHD) was created by the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing in 2008 to foster and support a global culture of handwashing with soap, shine a spotlight on the state of handwashing in every country, and raise awareness about the benefits of handwashing with soap. Their website offers several tools and activities to help students and teachers become involved in supporting this initiative. Younger students will enjoy the interactive "Hand Washing with Soap" game that teaches the importance of washing with soap. Teachers and school nurses can use the "Planners Guide" loaded with facts, activities, and suggestions as a resource for teaching students the importance of hand washing. Many resources are also available in French, Spanish, Japanese, and Arabic.

In the Classroom

Use information from this site as a resource when planning health units. Create a link to the hand-washing game for students on classroom computers or on your interactive whiteboard as a center. Share this site with health professionals in your school as a resource for their use. Challenge students to create a talking avatar using a photo or other image (legally permitted to be reproduced). The avatars can be used to explain the importance of hand washing. Use a site such as Blabberize (reviewed here). Challenge older students to use information from the site as a starting point for research in diseases spread through unhealthy practices in countries around the world.

Need to be in the know -- now? 5min Life Videopedia gives you five minute stories about current news in a range of areas including arts, business, health, video games and much more! The how-to videos are great too! The main page features current news highlights. You can join this site, but it is not necessary to view the videos. Please be advised that not all topics are class or school appropriate. The "Knowledge" section has many school-related topics, but there are also useful How-tos in other areas. Preview and select what to share. Videos include short ads at the start. Once the ad is over, you can click the small link icon to find a direct link or embed code for that video.This site includes advertising.

In the Classroom

This resource would be fantastic as a lesson or as a class opener to get students thinking about a particular topic. It also would be helpful for relating classroom topics and content to real life events. Filter the appropriate videos for your students by embedding them in a on your own website or wiki so that students are not distracted. With older students, you can have them use this as a resource to embed video clips or links in presentations and projects for their own classes. Try sharing one of the How To videos with your students in science class, and then have them make their own how to five minute video to demonstrate a lab. Share the videos using a tool such as SchoolTube reviewed here.

Created by the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, this site allows you to virtually prepare and embalm a mummy. Begin with instructions for pulling the brain out of the nose, then you remove the body's organs, fill the body with salt, wrap it with linens, and prepare it for the afterlife. Potentially unfamiliar words are highlighted, and clicking on them provides an audio dictionary to teach the meaning. While it's not too graphic, it's just "gross" enough that students will love it.

In the Classroom

Use on an interactive whiteboard or projector, or allow students to do their own individual "embalming" on a classroom or home computer. Create a center using your interactive whiteboard and allow small groups to manipulate the whiteboard and the "life size" mummy. You'll need to provide the context for the activity; the site is simply a chance to virtually prepare a mummy. Share t during a unit on Ancient Egypt. This would be intriguing to do around the Halloween holiday.

This site provides a number of recipes for cosmetics that are safe to make and missing all harmful chemicals. From lip gloss to deodorant to face paint, this site has it. Discover the natural approach with some science on the side.

In the Classroom

Use in a personal hygiene or health course to teach good practices. This is a great addition to family and consumer science or chemistry class for students to see science in practice. This site may inspire some terrific science fair projects, as well. Make your Halloween makeup an all-natural option. Challenge students to create one of the products and share their creations on a video. Share them using a tool such as SchoolTube reviewed here.

Teach students about foods, measurement, or nutrition, and find great recipes at Visual Recipes. View a picture of each step of the recipe as you read the directions. English language learners and new learners to foods will find this a great resource.

In the Classroom

Choose recipes to create a menu that meets all of the requirements of the new USDA "MyPlate." Analyze a typical dish to look at calories and the breakdown of the nutrients. Be a food scientist, choosing recipes that are examples of different types of solutions (homogeneous and heterogeneous) or basic chemical reactions. Encourage healthy eating, ethnic exploration through foods, and many other topics with these easy to follow pictures and directions. World language teachers will love this visual approach to foods in another culture and can ask students to "narrate" a visual recipe in the new language while presenting on interactive whiteboard or projector. Use visual recipes to teach sequencing for writing about step by step process using words like "first, then, next." Challenge cooperative learning groups to make their own slideshow/recipe for a favorite dish of their choice using a site such as 280Slides (reviewed here).

The Enhanced Calorie Calculator allows you to count calories by searching a food type by keyword. The calorie calculator (and fat gram calculator) provide the fat grams and calories associated with the keyword. To use the site, enter a food item and see what options are shown. Some fast food calorie counts are included, for example, enter the keyword hamburger and counts are provided for lean and regular beef hamburgers, hamburger rolls, and McDonald's hamburgers. Individual items can be added to a list to provide a total calorie count for an entire meal. If your first search does not work, try shortening to fewer keywords.

In the Classroom

This site is perfect for use during health and nutrition units. Ask students to create a daily food log then use the site to find daily fat and calorie totals. Have students estimate calorie and fat counts of common food items then search for them on the site to compare perception versus reality. Use this site for students to search for low calorie alternatives to common food items in their diets. Have students create simple online nutrition posters using PicLits (reviewed here).

The site uses teen role models to show students how to eat nutritious foods, exercise, participate in sports, etc. in order to stay healthy. This site encourages preteens and young teems to stay active, achieve academically, and involve themselves in community projects. You can become a member of the Ask, Listen, Learn team with a simple registration (a parent's email address is required). The site uses those who've registered as their "superstars," those whose stories and life habits appear on the pages. The motto for the activities on these pages is "Say yes to a healthy lifestyle, and no to underage drinking." The site includes the "Ecochallenge" which helps students become more aware of their environment. The site was originally designed to help combat underage drinking and drunk driving. However, there are many other topics here to explore.

In the Classroom

Have your students create an online photo essay about themselves, modeling the project on Lolo's page which emphasizes the whole person: one's body, spirit, emotional well-being, community participation, etc. Use a tool such as Web Poster Wizard (reviewed here) or PicLits (reviewed here), or use an online poster creator, such as Padlet (reviewed here). Have students make checklists for themselves following the criteria they notice in the other stories at this site.

Be sure to include this link on your class website as parents may be interested in exploring this site.

This eclectic site has something for everyone about the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. For younger students, be sure to meet the mascots of the site, view the interactives, and more. Students of all ages can use this site to learn about the schedule, view photos and videos, learn about each sport in the winter 2010 Olympics, trace the torch relay, view a spectator guide, meet the athletes, view the interactive map, and more.

In the Classroom

Share the video clips on your interactive whiteboard or projector. Introduce the mascots to your students and discuss their relevance. Have students research various athletes or sports and create a multimedia presentation. Use the Olympics as the theme for your study of world geography. Have students create online posters on paper or do it together as a class using a tool such as Web Poster Wizard (reviewed here) or PicLits (reviewed here). Have cooperative learning groups create online books using a tool such as Bookemon, reviewed here.