Totally 3rd Grade Blog

Share your views about teaching 3rd grade

• About this site
• Music Site
• Contact

While not a flashy looker on the outside, Education.com sports beautiful, quality printables that are exceptionally well-organized and easily sortable.  They’re also free and numerous.

Reading, math, social studies, science, writing, games, holidays and arts and crafts are all represented. One of the nice features of the site is that all of these materials can be presorted first by grade level and then by topic within that level.  That will save you a ton of time since you won’t have to scroll though every document on the site to find what you want.

Another neat feature is the fish-eye preview of each document.  Every printable has a thumbnail picture that can be magnified by hovering your mouse over the image.  This makes it very quick and simple to determine if you’ve found what you’re looking for or not.  No more  “download surprises.”

This site is huge.  I’m just mentioning the worksheets here because I think they’re very good and super easy to peruse.  If you have a little extra time to explore, you might want to check out their activities section, which has the same presorting  feature that the worksheets enjoy.  (Sorry, no fish-eye enlarger).

This site is a winner.  Take me to Education.com to see some great worksheets.

I’ve recently discovered 2 Google search functions that work really well and that practically nobody uses.  The first is known as “site search” and the other is “file search.”

Site search allows you to look for something on a website without actually going to the site. This is especially powerful when applied to education sites since so many of them are massive link farms.  There’s good stuff available, but you have to work hard to find it and it can be sloooow.

Here’s a likely scenario: you need resources to teach a unit about counting money.  You seem to remember seeing something good on superteacherworksheets.com, but you’re not sure.  Rather than going to the site and nosing round, type the following formula into the Google search bar:

[subject] [site:] [website address]

Press “search” and you’ll get a list of all of the materials that exist on the site for money.  If they have something, you’ll see what they’ve got and if they don’t have anything, you won’t waste time hunting for a dead end.

Regardless of how inefficient or unorganized the navigation of some sites may be, this technique will cut right through and deliver the goods.  How cool is that!

The second search function you may want to try is “filetype” search. With this search option, you type in the subject, “filetype:” and then the type of file you want.  For example, if you want to find a PowerPoint presentation about simple machines you’d use this formula:

[subject] [filetype:] [type of file you want]

Press “search” and you’ll see every PowerPoint presentation that exists on the web.  (This works equally well for PDF files and Word docs).

I could see this being a powerful tool when you need to find a new way to approach a subject.  Pick your subject, use the “filetype:” function and investigate how other people have approached the topic.  Get creative!