Exploratorium
The Exploratorium is an awesome site to visit - both online and in real life. This is the original hands-on science museum established by Frank Oppenheimer (brother to Robert Oppenheimer, nuclear physicist) in San Fransisco in the 1960's. I have visited the actual museum and it is amazing - the whole museum is hands-on - it takes all day to get through! The website is amazing too. It is a hub for online resources, other sites, teaching and professional development tools and science experiments.
The top navigation bar is well set out. "Who are you?" tab allows you to enter as a teacher, a learner...or a geek! The teacher space begins with this wonderful greeting: "First of all, thanks! You are the heroes on the front lines of science education. A big part of the Exploratorium’s mission is to provide tools to make your work easier and more enriching". From here you are guided to resources for different age learners. There are other tools like the digital library that includes images, videos and links. The resources you can be linked to are within and outside the actual museum. It is a great library! Another link is to their regularly updated, "10 cool sites". Some are american but the staff have a wide interest and there are links all over the world and across the curriculum.
The Asset Archive makes links to materials within the mueum.
The Explore tab will take you to resources that support specific aspects/strands of the science curriculum. Again it is videos and links. My personal favourite (because I have used it in class, and sat in on the actual demo n the museum) is the "Cow's eye Dissection" - if you are too squeamish to cut into an eye yourself this can show your kids what they want to know. (If you do want to do it yourself just ask your butcher to get you one. A pig's eys work too!)
This is a huge site but the search engine within it works very well. Try it out yourself or.... let your kids explore and show you what they think looks interesting!
One of my favourite pages is called "Artists and Scientists" where they demonstrate the links between the creativity of both these groups of people. Fascinating!
Add this site to your toolbar - I think you'll find a lot of ideas to enliven your science proramme.
