I do love iTunes. I don’t buy, or even listen to, a lot of music, but the iTunes podcast directory is simply awesome. My computer is filled with over 25 gigs of podcast material, about half of which I haven’t had time to listen to yet.

Today I upgraded my software, and the first thing I noticed was a new link to something called iTunesU , which contains links to podcasts of courses and lectures from a wide variety of universities.

I’ve been a huge fan of the podcasts from UC Berkeley for quite a while now, but there are some really fascinating looking course podcasts in iTunesU that I missed completely from other institutions. I’ve started subscribing to all of them… though I have no idea when I’ll have time to listen to them all.

If you’re looking for a fun and interesting course to listen to, my favorites from UC Berkeley are:

• European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present — a nice, well presented overview. Good for audio only listening.
• Introduction to General Astronomy — the lecturer in this course is worth watching in the video version.
• Earthquakes in your backyard - This is a totally fascinating course, and not too hard to follow. It’s in audio only, but be sure to check out the course website to download the supplementary materials, which make it understandable.
• Man, God and Society in Western Literature — some of the audio in this one is really bad and/or missing, which sucks because this is a really great series of lectures, especially if you follow along with the readings.

School of Thought posted this page with Singing Science songs in MP3 format.

I downloaded them all and am burning my favorites to CD. Some of the songs there are great fun. My favorites are “What Makes the Weather”, “Why does the Sun Shine”, and ” Kinetic And Potential Energy”

Most of the others are good for a giggle or two. Some are outright hilarious.

I mentioned a few days ago that David brought a dinosaur kit from the bookstore.

Well, as of today, he’s done all the activities. Included in the box was

• 1 glow in the dark snap-together dinosaur skeleton
• 1 pink grow-and-shrink triceratops
• 1 block of clay with a hidden dinosaur with a pick/scraper and brush to “excavate” it and goggles for eye protection

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Independent Work

Weather Words Wordsearch (PDF)

Games and Activities for Kids at the FEMA website

Wondrous Weather monthly fun-sheet set at LearningPage.com (free registration required).

Lesson Plans

Weather Data - An Educator’s Reference Desk Lesson Plan

Basic Aspects of Winter - An Educator’s Reference Desk Lesson Plan

Cloud Formation

Fun Stuff

How Clouds are Formed - Song in MP3 format

What makes the Weather - Song in MP3 format

Interesting, advanced stuff

Earthquakes in your Backyard — a course taught at UC Berkeley. There are course notes and a full podcast of all the lectures, so you can ‘take’ the whole course. The material starts off pretty basic, and would probably be digestable to interested 9+ year olds.