Federal Resources for Educational Excellence. (n.d.). Free – teaching resources and lesson plans from the federal government. Retrieved from http://www.free.ed.gov/index.cfm
Summary
I found this site by choosing the free technology for ESL teachers and then looking over the main options listed there. This one jumped out at me and it is by no means just for ESL teachers. All of you should take a look at the wealth of information at this site! This site is produced by FREE, which stands for Federal Resources for Educational Excellence. This site covers nearly every content area from PE to Art, but seems to have lots of Science and History resources. I would actually say that all of the resources that are here are a bit overwhelming – just simply too many things to choose from. These are animations, documents, photos, and videos which can all lead to an endless number of possibilities. There is also a variety of professional development ideas from the Department of Education (DOE). I found the DOE's "How to Organize your Teaching" to be interesting as it provides videos to watch to help you to improve your skills as a teacher and then to improve the performance of your students. Also the advice it gives is practical.
Reflection
Several years ago, while teaching Medical English students in China, I had found the National Institute of Health's (NIH) website had lesson plans there. The FREE website has a link to the NIH lesson plans that are designed for middle school and high school students. Finding this brought back many memories to me. I had adapted several lessons from the site to meet my desire to introduce more medical vocabulary to students in a fun and exciting way. The NIH's lessons are curriculum supplements. One of those lesson supplements I used was about sleep (http://science.education.nih.gov/customers.nsf/HSSleep.htm) and another was about infectious diseases (http://science.education.nih.gov/customers.nsf/HSDiseases.htm). I highly recommend these NIH lesson plans and resources to any science teacher. My students loved the lessons, due to practicality of the lessons and knowledge. For example, for the sleep lessons, students kept track of the amount of sleep they got throughout each day for a week and then entered that data on a website provided by NIH. We then used that data to make graphs and draw some conclusions based on gender and other criteria. I think these lessons would work well for combined English and Science classes. For example, students could write a persuasive essay on what needs to be done to prevent infectious diseases or to compare and contrast diseases. So as I said already, FREE is a great site and will be one I bookmark for future reference and I recommend that you do as well.
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