Agriculture All Around

Although the corn mazes and hay rides have ended here in the valley and the season of rain (and possibly snow!) is upon us, it is never too late to learn more about the agriculture that sustains our nation.

My American Farm invites you to take a journey with them to learn more about this industry and help build agricultural awareness and understanding through education. This interactive site provides a variety of resources for educators and fun learning activities for kids of all ages.

 

To learn more about these topics, you and your students may also want to check out the following books:

From Seed to Plant, by Gail Gibbons

How Plants Grow, by Angela Royston

 

George Washington Carver: Ingenious Inventor, by Nathan Olson

 

Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin, by Jessica Gunderson

 

Louis Pasteur and Pasteurization, by Jennifer Fandel

 

Additional books and resources about agriculture can be found here:

Sustainable Agricultural Resources for Teachers, K-12

Farm Bureau Arkansas: Ag in the Classroom

Better World Books: Agriculture

Honoring those who serve(d)

Veterans Day: Remembering Our War Heroes, by Elaine Landau

 

H Is for Honor: A Military Family Alphabet, by Devin Scillian

The Wall, by Eve Bunting

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For more information about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, visit the History Channel’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Infographic.

 

And to learn more about the history of Veterans Day, read my post here.

 

Thank you to those who have served our country!

Math and Imagination

The Math Playground is a fun educational site with all kinds of games, videos, and info. One of their interactive offerings is Spirograph Math which I just had to try. It brought to mind great childhood memories of times my mom would bring out her old spirograph kit and let my sister and me play with it. We had endless hours of fun creating new designs and painstakingly trying them over and over to get them perfect.

Of course this online version eliminates the need for so much patience and a steady hand, but it does provide more information about the mathematical details involved in each pattern’s creation.For a more hands-on approach, have your students use an actual spirograph kit along with the online Spirograph Math version.

Although in my opinion, these new ones do not hold a candle to my mom’s vintage spirograph that captured my childhood imagination. 🙂