Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Printable Informational Resources for Student Essays and Reports


See vintage texts from my Google Books library. I've collected over 5000 vintage educational texts from which to draw homeschool curriculum. It has been really helpful for books reports, research, lessons, and other homeschool materials. I use the search box at the link; however, I also use the general Google Book search to expand my searches.

All books in my library are free to download(PDF). Some of the magazines like Life and Boys Life are viewable online only, and not available for download.

Printing individual pages used to be very simple, but they no longer have a button to switch the text to HTML. You can still do it though. Simply use the Plain Text button on the top right of any page in the book, then scroll to the end of the web address, delete the "text" after output=text, which will be at the end of the address. Type in "html" in lieu of the word "text", load the page with this address, and you'll have a page which can be right clicked to save or print.

Pages can be copied and pasted in plain text, but sometimes there are problems with the conversion at Google Books - missed words, gibberish, etc.

Here are some pages my son(age 13) will be using for an essay on How Bees Make Honey. They cover the topic of bees more broadly if you click back to previous pages, or go forward within the section. I've saved these links in HTML, so you don't need to change them. To save or print, right click only on the image of the book pages at the links or you'll get the entire screen.

THE ANATOMY OF THE HONEY BEE.

Do Bees Make or Gather Honey?

A Manual of Natural History: Bees Contradicts above contention that honey is made.

Compare and contrast: modern answer to this question here - How Do Bees Make Honey? About.com

Lessons in Nature, Volume 1: Bees(plain text - copy and paste) or HTML(several pages).

Short essay on bees with fill-in-the-blank prepositions... just for fun. ; )

Observations by Apiarists(Best nectar producing plants)

The Kitchen Table, Honey and the Honey Bee

A Dictionary of General Knowledge: Honey

The Bee-keeper's Guide(very scientific with detailed anatomy)

More on bees in my library here(405 general references to bees). Nice illustrations too.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I have to tell you that your homeschooling library has been the biggest boost to my homeschool. I have used some books as main text, supplements to High School and our Rod and Staff. How do you find such amazing goodies ? If I do not have a specific title my goole books search is very fruitless; so to speak. Thank you for doing what you do!!

Alexandra said...

Oh, I'm so glad! Half the fun is in sharing these super resources. Some of my finds are working off recommendations from texts, or vintage teacher's guides. I've been wanting to post more of these guides. They are very helpful for developing and supplementing study topics.

Isn't Rod & Staff great! I'll be sad to see it end, but my son really wants to do grades 9-12 with Christian Light Education(CLE) which is very similar.