Covers Many Topics
5/23/23 DVDs at libraries, hopefully yours has them
- The Great Courses DVDs - awesome. Highly recommend, though taking notes should help since they're dense in detail-rich college level information. Don't take this to mean that kids either can't or shouldn't watch them; kids would love this stuff, I'm sure.
- PBS documentaries
- The old Bill Nye the Science Guy series - skip everything with "safety matters" type stuff and Disney on it, and go to the stuff made prior to all that. It is still relevant.
Books
- Thirty Days Has September by Chris Stevens - contains a large assortment of memory aids for various topics, including geography, history, and math. It's useful for adults and children alike.
Book Series
- Must Know High School by McGraw-Hill - seemingly decent introductions to the fields of study but can be very boring and hard to get through,
especially Must Know High School Chemistry 3/20/23 turns out it's impossible to get through without starting to hate Chemistry itself. I recommend it if you want to read a Chemistry book and then never do anything related to Chemistry ever again.
- Great Books - the original source material for a lot of modern-day textbooks. Expensive and hard to find, and in many cases hard to read due to olde English type presentation. Don't know about you but when the s's look like f's it drives me nuts.
- The Cartoon Guide To series by Larry Gonick et al. - provides an excellent introduction to various fields of study, however I am not a fan of Hypercapitalism because it's tainted with the perspective of people who have never had the misfortune of living in a Communist or Fascist regime or knowing someone who has. Seems to be best at explaining history.
- 5/23/23 Bill Nye the Science Guy's older books for kids, which actually aren't just for kids. They're still relevant. Newer stuff, I honestly don't know.
- The Handy _ Answer Book series - generally decent information on a wide variety of topics, but can oversimplify (as in the Handy Physics Answer Book)
- Barron's AP - I am just now getting my hands on some of these. They look very promising.
Possibly, everything by Janice VanCleave. She wrote a series that includes math for every child, earth science, biology, chemistry, and astronomy, and they seem to be targeted to the youngest possible audience. Potentially excellent to start homeschoolers on. I haven't got ahold of anything but the math book yet but that one is great and has no useless filler. Not recommended anymore thanks to reasons explained in the Math section.
- Kids Can Press - helpful for younger students
- Klutz Books - ditto
- Books by Laurie Carlson - ditto, and might not be that accurate, best at teaching crafts
Online Resources
- Today In Sci A perpetual almanac of a whole awful lot of science-based events. The Indiana Pi Bill is the most hilarious I found of these. Square the circle!!! We can do it!
- ThoughtCo Contains supplementary information for basically all K-12 subjects and college 101s. Worth frequenting.
- Internet Archive The library of the Internet and thus the world. The scanned books are hit-or-miss for reading, and often are barely legible, but it's there.
- SomethingAwful SomethingAwful has really low standards for their mods and really high standards for original posters, as in, people that start threads. Their mods are so shady that I would never recommend you give them any money or join up to post, but you can find a lot of information there if you know where to look. They're a little like Buzzfeed and Ebaumsworld though in that the really good stuff is buried under mounds and mounds of utter garbage.
- TED talks Short presentations done by a wide variety of scientists, professionals, and unique individuals in order to spread ideas to promote positive change. If you want to shake your world up a bit, watch at least one TED talk per month.
- WonderHowTo 6/11/23 Just a heads up, it's wild. Obviously hasn't been vetted as a 100% reliable information source, and has a wide variety of articles and posters, often anonymous posters. I would recommend it for an assortment of knowledge and links to things you are very unlikely to find otherwise, especially things like cooking lifehacks, accessible ways of tackling challenging everyday situations in life, home ec topics, and things like that. Regarding other topics that are more academically rigorous, this wouldn't be my first choice for searching for them but hey, you never know.
Youtube Channels
- Youtubes section of this site listing many channels
- Crash Course Doesn't go into too much detail but you will pick up useful tidbits here and there. Worth watching.
Big Brain Time
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