Lesson 3: The SIRS Discoverer

The SIRS Discoverer has an incredible amount of information. I liked the way articles were divided by newspaper, magazine, reference, graphic and webfind. The levels also make this sight very user friendly. I looked up pheasant and ended up finding an article in the Easy section, from a July 1995 issue of Cricket magazine.  This article told about the two golden pheasants from King Louis XVI's aviary given to George Washington by his friend the Marquis de Lafayette. The birds died and were preserved and mounted by Charles W. Peale, a naturalist at that time. They are still in the Harvard Museum of Natural History today. (This was so interesting that I later went to Google to find a picture of the pheasants at the museum today.)

I selected South Korea as my country in "Country Facts" . Wow, what a huge amount of information  in a quick to access area, anything I would need to know about South Korea from the present to ancient history was there.

I looked at the United States Historical map. You can pull up any decade in the United States and find pertinent facts for politics, religion, exploration and settlement, wars, current affairs, etc . It is mind boggling to see so much information at your fingertips. I only wish I had more time to pursue this.

In the SIRS Issues Researcher I looked up the Banned Books topic and read different pros and cons. I emailed a few of these articles to myself to pursue later.

In the Curriculum Pathfinders I looked at a few different learning areas for arithmetic. The Basketball math would be a fun interactive game for a child having problems in math. The visual hand on games and references are wonderful and inventive tools to make learning fun.