K-12 Reading and Writing Worksheets

K12 Reader provides free printable worksheets for students in grades K-12. Students can brush up on their spelling, reading skills, grammar, composition, and vocabulary. You can sort the worksheets by grade or by topic to find the best worksheet for you. Every worksheet comes with an answer key, and most have a mini-lesson at the top to further aid the learning process.

K-12 Math Worksheets

Math Worksheets Land is a great resource for math students of all ages. Whether you missed a lesson or you're trying to study for an upcoming quiz, Math Worksheets Land has the answer. You can sort worksheets by grade-level or by topic. The site is very straight-forward to navigate and will provide you with a guided lesson and two worksheets for every topic. If you know where your weak areas are in math, this can be a great resource to help you target them and turn them into strengths.

You can got a lot of free content on the site, but you might want to consider paying for full access if you're an educator. With a site subscription, you'll unlock answer keys, three homework sheets for each topic, three quizzes for each topic, three addition practice sheets for each topic, and a variety of tests for each grade level.

National Parks and Wildlife Refuges

Visiting any one of America's protected areas, national or state parks, wildlife refuges, or designated natural areas can be a learning experience for the whole family. Discover how America the Beautiful got its name by visiting a national park near you.

Hidden Kingdoms Documentary Series

In the BBC's own words, Hidden Kingdoms allows viewers to "immerse {themselves} in the lives of extraordinary characters that stand a few inches tall. From chipmunks to mice, be entertained and spellbound by the creatures that call the Hidden Kingdoms home."

Hidden Kingdoms: Under Open Skies

Hidden Kingdoms: Secret Forests 

Wild Weather Documentary Series

In the BBC documentary series Wild Weather, presenter Richard Hammond travels around the globe to show viewers how the forces of wind, water, and temperature shape our world. Viewers of all ages will enjoy watching him chase a tornado, build a fire twister, fly a helicopter into a cloud, start a controlled avalanche, and build his very own dust storm.

Wild Weather: Wind

Wild Weather: Water

Wild Weather: Temperature 

Filthy Cities Documentary Series

Filthy Cities is a BBC documentary series that explores three historical cities and analyzes how their efforts to clean up led to lasting social, political, economic, and infrastructural changes that helped bring each city into the modern age.

Filthy Cities: Medieval London

Filthy Cities: Revolutionary Paris

Filthy Cities: Industrial New York

I would recommend this documentary series only for high schoolers and mature middle school students due to the depiction of disease, death, organic decay, and execution.

Dictionary Word of the Day

If you're looking to broaden your vocabulary, you might want to consider subscribing to Dictionary.com's Word of the Day. You'll get a little e-mail in your inbox every morning telling you the meaning of a brand new word and giving you an example or two of it's usage over time. You'll also learn about the origin of the word, which all of you linguistics fans out there will find cool, and you can click on a button to have the word read aloud to you if you'd like to use it sometime soon and want to ensure your pronunciation is on-point.

Collection of Online Interactives

Check out this collection of educational interactives from all over the Internet. They're meant mainly for students in grades K-5, but I have to confess that I had fun clicking around the site too. The site hosts links to science, math, ELA, social studies, music, art, and Spanish interactives and is very easy to navigate, so I'm sure that it'll be a breeze to find exactly what you want to learn about.

Encouraging Serious Scientists

Most children have some level of interest in science, even if they don't realize it. Young children will marvel at roadkill and play with worms. Some students will display an intense interest in dinosaurs, volcanoes, hurricanes, robotics, or marine science. Unfortunately, many students slowly loose interest in science as they make their way through the school system. Some maintain some level of interest, but hide or suppress it because the sad reality of life in America is that science simply isn't "cool" to the vast majority of school-aged children.

However, some students' love of science will only grow and blossom as they age. Every new piece of knowledge flames the fires of their curiosity, and oftentimes these students will know from an early age that they wish to pursue a scientific career.

I was one of those students. I got straight A's all through high school, and I got a full-ride scholarship to a very small, very exclusive, very elite college specializing in a cutting-edge field of science. What happened next is something I like to refer to as my own personal version of Paradise Lost, but that's not entirely relevant to this post. What is is that I was one of those little Serious Scientists, and I'd like to share some of what my parents did to encourage and build my love of science.

Before we get started, I'd like to say that some of these strategies can be a bit of an investment and are generally only for mature, responsible, well-coordinated students who can be trusted to use high-quality instruments that can be dangerous if handled irresponsibly.

My uncle got me a high-quality dissection kit for my ninth birthday. My mother, perhaps understandably so, thought he was just a little bit mad for doing so. After all, most parents probably don't want their children fooling around with surgical equipment at the age of 9. I was throughly briefed on how to use the kit and how to avoid injuring myself while using it, and it was impressed upon me that my parents were putting a lot of responsibility in my hands by allowing me to own such an item. I was not allowed to use the kit without supervision for several years (again, perfectly reasonable) and for the most part, my methods were rudimentary and unskilled. I didn't know how much pressure to apply to cut into my first frog without rupturing most of his organs, and I hadn't yet mastered the delicate magic of removing said organs in one piece. My first rat didn't go all that well either, but my second was quite a bit better. But by the time I graduated to dissecting the roadkill squirrel I'd begged my mother to allow me to take home, I'd gotten pretty good. I'd never skinned such a large mammal before, but I ended up with a sizable piece of the pelt, both of its ears, and its tail. I then proceeded to dissect it, and I'd like to say that I conclusively proved it was run over by a blue Jeep Wrangler traveling at precisely 24 miles an hour, but I wasn't that good. However, I was able to get most of the organs out in one piece, which I counted as a win for Team Me.

Dissections, when paired with other scientific endeavors like de-fleshing and reconstructing the skeleton of an animal that died of natural causes (the library in my house is currently littered with a partial cat skeleton, a huge fish skull and most of its vertebrae, several bird skulls, and the above-mentioned squirrel parts) can help to foster a life-long love of science. I myself learned much about anatomy, biology, and organic decay through careful dissections and controlled decomposition coupled with copious amounts of research.

If you do decide to purchase a dissection kit for your child, please make sure to tell them about what is and isn't acceptable to dissect in addition to giving them a series of safety lectures. The family pet is obviously not going to end up under the blade, and healthy, live animals should never be killed for the purpose of a dissection. However, it's fine to purchase frozen rats from the local pet store (most stores carry them as food for large snakes) or frogs specifically preserved for the purposes of dissections. Animals found on the side of the road should be used with extreme caution. If they're extremely fresh and not yet rotting or covered in maggots, it's probably safe to work with them as long as you use gloves, a disposable hospital mask, and make sure to disinfect your tools before and after working with it, which is a practice you should get into anyway. A fish caught in non-protected waters is also a good choice. If your child is in high school, you might even want to look into purchasing a suckling pig preserved and sold for dissections.

A microscope is also an excellent purchase to make for a science-loving child. I'd recommend that you buy a few pre-made slides for them to look at as well as several blank slides or petri dishes so they can look at small household debris like dust, hair, sugar, salt, spices, soap flakes, sand, insects, and clothing fibres.

I'd also suggest planning a yearly trip to the planetarium, if your financial circumstances allow.

My parents also purchased a telescope for me, and I used to take it out every night during the summer to look at the moon (and Mars and Venus when they came close enough to Earth).

I also have several chemistry kits, nearly every book Carl Sagan ever wrote, as well as an indoor star projector, a DNA kit, a Starfinder, and several dozen fossils.

Obviously, not every family has the same circumstances as mine, and not every child is interested in the same fields of science. I am not in any way implying that you should replicate what my family did; I am merely suggesting that you should foster your child's love for science to the best of your ability. All of the items mentioned in this post cost money, but there are dozens of other free resources on this blog you can use instead of these or in conjunction with them.

If you have any questions or suggestions about the items mentioned in this post, please feel free to leave a comment.

Nature Walks

Talking nature walks can be a great way to teach young children about their environment and community. When I was little, I used to go out with a tiny hand basket to collect interesting leaves, rocks, stray flowers, and twigs I found on the way. My mother and I would keep a look out for colorful birds and listen for their songs, and Mom would point out trees in their various phases of budding, flowering, and turning colors in the autumn. She'd tell me about the grass and the trees and the sky and the clouds and how it all came together to work as one sustainable ecosystem. Under her loving supervision, I learned about how clouds made rain and how the trees and plants around me used that water along with sunlight to make energy for themselves. She showed me where the mosses and lichens fit into that world of green, and together we watched the coming and goings of the insects and spiders that made a home for themselves on our block. One day each week for an entire year, we walked around the corner to the tree where the ladybugs came to mate and lay their eggs, and once we spotted the first egg, we came back every day to see if we could catch them hatching into larvae.

I still remember the summer a rather hardy spider spun a web in the space between a small stone pillar and a neighbor's picket fence. It's been a great many years since I last saw that spider, and I know that in all likelihood she's long since perished, but some part of me wants to believe that she's still out there, spinning spindly little webs in small, dark places.

I also remember the day we found a half-eaten cupcake about half a block from our house. It was crawling with ants, and my three-year-old self was completely and utterly captivated. I could hardly believe that such tiny creatures could disassemble a piece of food many hundreds of times larger than themselves. Somehow, they managed it, and when we went back a few hours later at my insistence, all that was left of the abandoned treat was a stained wrapper and a dozen straggler ants who hadn't realized the feast was over.

As I grew older, we still went on walks together in the gentler months of the year. Occasionally we found a pinecone or some other such treasure. We may have even borrowed a fig or two from the tree a few blocks north of here, but nothing has ever been conclusively proven on that matter.

Nowadays, those nature walks are some of my best childhood memories. My mom could have sat me down with some dusty old book about trees or handed me the TV remote, but she didn't. Instead, she chose to bundle me up in my coziest sweater and arm me with a tiny hand basket so we could discover the splendor of the natural world together, as a family.