Blogs

Grammar girl has a highly readable explanation of what a run-on sentence is and how to fix one depending on the writing style you want to achieve: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/run-on-sentences.aspx - also available as a podcast.

Here is a fun example of a really long sentence, though not a run-on since it is all connected phrases:

DEATH SENTENCE
Have you heard how Cuthbert Hatch
To find a gas leak struck a match
And thereby hastened his dispatch
To realms unknown to you and me
Who have not yet been foolishly
Inclined to leave posterity
To puzzle for itself just why

'Sploder' looks promising - has game creators for different types of games : http://www.sploder.com/free-game-creator.php

Making the best use of the morning commute is a challenge, when kids are still sleepy and not ready for anything too challenging. One possibility is to play an audio snippet. To play in the car without wifi, save the file ahead of time by right-clicking on the link to the .mp3 and choosing 'Save link as...' or similar.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/podcast/ has free podcasts about 'this day in history' with Garrison Keillor reading

Mark Twain snippets have been recorded and some of the funny bits are available here:
http://www.oldfashionedamericanhumor.com/sales-page.html

This was recommended by teen volunteers at our public library, who also liked The Giver, Hunger Games and Brave New World : Harrison Bergeron

well written grammar exercises and explanations

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/index.htm

http://www.studentsfriend.com/aids/curraids/maps/sfworldp.pdf prints on a full page, some other map sites print a smaller world map that is harder to label

My 6 year old came up with this one: invite your friends to each add a character to a game, and see what happens.

"Is the United States about a tenth of the world?" Believe or not, my almost-six year old asked this last night. Her big sisters have been doing a lot of fractions, and we talk about sizes of things.

I wasn't sure.

Scratch from MIT : http://scratch.mit.edu is a graphical interface for creating logical object-oriented programs, quickly and easily. I read a review of it in MAKE Magazine some months ago and finally tried it out. Looks extremely promising, and its easy to put together a simple intelligent animation in minutes. (well, a bit more for reading the instructions - but after I read them it didn't take long)

I like to start off teaching Javascript, because everyone with a computer has all the tools you need: a browser and a text editor. Its pretty easy to have kids change the screen color, make pop-ups appear, take user input and munge it around. But kids want to program games, so I'm considering Flash. In the meantime, here is a full-fledged Javascript game we may try to edit.

http://code.google.com/p/js-blaster/

This is a blog post rather than a lesson plan, as we haven't tried it out yet!