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Tweens/Teens Resources
Reading Lists
Novel Novice is a place dedicated to showcasing Young Adult literature, encouraging reading and promoting education. We’ve now expanded to include reviews of adult romance, as well as select children’s and middle grade titles. has out of the ordinary teen book lists!
Teen Book Finder from YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) helps teens from 12 to 18 years of age find award-winning titles.
Reading Rants! has out of the ordinary teen book lists!
Wisconsin’s Digital Library for Teens is the place to download your favorite books!
Great Graphic Novels for Teens lists are first rate in the marriage of storytelling and art and have appeal for a wide range of teen readers from the Young Adult Library Services Association.
The Hub site from YALSA offers recommendations for great teen reads, polls about your favorite teen reading topics and YA fun!
Young Adults’ Choices from the CBC can be counted on as the new books that teens have enjoyed reading and voted on as their favorites.
Teen’s Top Ten is a “teen choice” list, where teens nominate and choose their favorite books of the previous year!
Novelist K-8 enables kids to find read-alikes, award winners, books-to-movies and more! Check out Novelist K-8 for great kids’ book suggestions! Must sign in with your library card.
Tech/Gaming Websites
Curiosity Machine supports students, parents and educators, and mentors to build, learn and teach using the engineering design process.
Tinker Cad is the easiest, fiercest 3D design tool around!
Made With Code is a google-led initiative to get more girls involved in computer programming.
App Inventor is a free, cloud-based service that teaches the basics of programming apps for Android devices.
Computer Science Online connects students with hundreds of MOOCs (college level classes made available, free of charge, for unlimited participation).
Scratch teaches programming language to create stories, games, and animation. It is designed and maintained by the LifeLong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Kids have an option to join or refrain from sharing creations online with others.
Fun and Educational Websites
PBS has curated FREE, standards-aligned videos, interactives, lesson plans, and more for all grade levels!
Scholastic Learn at Home has day by day projects to keep kids reading, thinking and growing.
Children’s Book Council has resources from fiction to non-fiction, STEM books to graphic novels. Book publishers have created a wealth of content to support educators, librarians, booksellers, parents, and caregivers. Compiled here are links to various publishers websites where you can find these free resources.
HoodaMath is filled with addicting math games.
Toymaker free paper toys that you can make yourself. Just print them out, cut, glue and enjoy. I’ve tried to keep them easy to figure out.
ChessKid is a fun way to play chess with other kids or with a robot!
FunBrain is for kids ages preschool through grade 8 and offers more than 100 fun, interactive games that develop skills in math, reading, and literacy. Plus, kids can read a variety of popular books and comics on the site, including Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Amelia Writes Again, and Brewster Rocket.
Red Ted Art – Easy to follow crafts and ideas for all age groups from RedTedArt.com. The crafts are designed to be made from every day items, so you can usually get crafting straight away!
Book Club for Kids is a free, 20-minute podcast devoted to middle grade books and readers. Each show features a trio of students discussing a favorite book, an interview with the author, and a celebrity reading.
Maker Maven has lots of free S.T.E.A.M. projects you can do at home without any special equipment.
Tinkerlab YouTube Channel – Science experiments, engineering projects, crafts, and art projects for kids and little inventors, from TinkerLab®.
Top Ten Podcasts for Tweens & Teens is a list of age-appropriate podcasts picked for tweens and teens, approved by Common Sense Media.
TED Talks for Kids features videos of inspiring and informative speakers for teens.
Homework/Reference
Ellsworth Community Schools’ Card Catalogs can be accessed from here to search your school’s media center’s catalog.
Khan Academy has tons of lessons in a variety of subjects and covers early learners all the way up to college and adult learners. Even includes some test-prep lessons.
Cool Math can answer questions about how to do math homework and offers some fun math games, too.
Calculators allows the user to pick any type of online calculator needed to do your work, from basic to science to trigonometry!
Easy Bib formats your citations in a variety of styles from a variety of sources.
Merriam-Webster Online Search is four standard resources in one place! It includes an online dictionary, thesaurus, Spanish-English dictionary and a new medical dictionary.
WolframAlpha site computes answers to your questions or calculations. This is a great way to compare statistics and do complex math problems.
Learn a Language
Transparent Language Online is a free interactive, online language program that is accessed with a MORE library card.
Music Livestreams
Pixabay’s audio collection features instrumental recordings across a wide range of genres. You can listen to the tracks in their entirety before downloading them. Like all other media on Pixabay, you can download and reuse the sound tracks for free. And as they state in the terms of use, you don’t have to cite them but it is appreciated.
Dig CC Mixter offers thousands of songs that are Creative Commons licensed. The site is divided into three main categories. Those categories are Instrumental Music for Film & Video, Free Music for Commercial Projects, and Music for Video Games. Within each category you can search according to genre, instrument, and style. When you click the download icon on a file you will be prompted to copy the attribution information that is required to include in your project.
Bensound offers a few hundred music tracks that you can download for free. Those tracks are arranged in eight categories. Those categories are acoustic/folk, cinematic, corporate/pop, electronica, urban/groove, jazz, rock, and world. You can listen to the tracks before you download them. When you click the download button you will see the clear rules about using the music. You can download and use the music in your video projects for free provided that you credit Bensound for the music. Alternatively, you can purchase a license to use the music wherever you want without crediting Bensound.
NPR Music offers up not only a large collection of music to listen to, but a large collection of live streamed and recorded jam sessions, concerts and events.
NPR’s List of Free Livestreamed Concerts is constantly updating this list of free live streamed concerts that are happening during the pandemic.
Berliner Philharmonic offers access to live streamed concerts and recordings for the next 30 days.
Göteborgs Symfoniker will be available to all music lovers on GSOplay. The concerts can be enjoyed for free for anyone on the web or through [their] app – wherever you are.
Wigmore Hall provides recordings and live streams of their performances at no cost year round.
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center provides recordings and live streams of their performances at no cost year round.
Detroit Symphony Orchestra provides recordings and live streams of their performances at no cost year round.
Animal/Nature Livestreams
Eagle Cam This eagle camera is brought to you by the Minnesota DNR Non-game Wildlife Program, which helps over 700 species of Minnesota wildlife thrive. (seasonal)
Explore.org – This site has multiple live streams covering everything from nature cameras to animal sanctuaries.
Atlanta Zoo has a live camera feed of pandas.
Houston Zoo has live camera feeds of chimps, elephants, giraffes, gorillas, leaf cutter ants and rhinos.
Kansas City Zoo has live camera feeds of giraffes, penguins and polar bears.
Maryland Zoo has live camera feeds of flamingos, giraffes, goats, lions and penguins.
National Zoo has live camera feeds of elephants, lions, naked mole rats and pandas.
San Diego Zoo has live camera feeds of apes, baboons, burrowing owls, condors, elephants, giraffes, koalas, penguins, polar bears and tigers.
Aquarium of the Pacific has live camera feeds of Jellyfish, penguins, sharks and large aquarium views.
Georgia Aquarium has live camera feeds of beluga whales, Jellyfish, penguins, piranhas, sea lions, sea otters and the Indo-Pacific Barrier Reef.
Monterrey Bay Aquarium has live camera feeds of aviary, coral reef, jellyfish, kelp forests, penguins, sea otters and sharks.
Virtual Fieldtrips
City Walks are virtual walks in more than a dozen cities around the world. You can experience the cities with or without sound. You can go for virtual walks in the daytime or at night. At the start of each walk you’ll see some quick facts about the city that might help you understand a little more about what you’re seeing during the walk.
DiscoveryEducation allows everyone to take a field trip with Polar Bear researchers, blast off into space at the Johnson Space Center, go behind the scenes with the NFL or any number of behind the scene tours with Discovery Education. Includes teaching guides and curriculum for interested parents and adults.
OK360 allows eveyone to go to Oklahoma and take a virtual hike. With 360 views and multiple videos of nature trails in OK, you can learn more about nature in the panhandle state.
360 Cities is a large collection of panoramic interactive photographs that allow you to virtually travel around the world.
Star Atlas is an online planetarium that will show the stars from any location in the world and where the constellations are in the night sky. The site tells you how far the stars are away from earth. For information on the constellations head here.
Nature Works Everywhere allows everyone to take a field trip into nature. Nature Works Everywhere has 11 virtual field trips for multiple age ranges, alongside videos and lesson plans for parents and teachers.
Yellowstone National Park allows you to virtually tour some of the main attractions around the park. Included with each tour is additional information about visiting in person.
ASU Virtual Field Trips offers up virtual field trips for high school and college students, covering everything from the Mars rover to prehistoric times to the rain forests.
Mount Vernon is the most popular historic estate in America. Come and visit George Washington’s home virtually.
Buckingham Palace allows everyone to take a virtual tour of some of the rooms in the Buckingham Palace and learn more about the history surrounding the British Monarchy.
Virtual Museum Tours
Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam houses the largest collection of artworks by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) in the world.
MASP (The Museu de Arte de São Paulo) is a private, nonprofit museum founded by Brazilian businessman Assis Chateaubriand, in 1947, as Brazil’s first modern museum.
Uffizi Gallery was designed by Giorgio Vasari in 1560 for Cosimo de’Medici to house the Granducal Magistratures of Tuscany.
Musée d’Orsay displays collections of art from the period 1848 to 1914.
Louvre allows all to visit the museum’s exhibition rooms and galleries thanks to the sponsorship of Shiseido.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents over 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy.
The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center features works of art dating from the eighth through the twenty-first century, showcased against a backdrop of dramatic architecture, tranquil gardens, and breathtaking views of Los Angeles.
The Art Institute of Chicago is a world-renowned art museum housing one of the largest permanent collections in the United States.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is modeled after a Venetian palazzo and houses one of the world’s most remarkable art collections.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is one of the most comprehensive art museums in the world with a collection that exemplifies the breadth, richness, and diversity of artistic expression, from prehistoric times to modern day.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is the largest cultural institution in the region.
National Museum of Natural History is one of the Smithsonian Museums and allows visitors to take self-guided, room-by-room tours of select exhibits and areas within the museum from their desktop or mobile device.
National Museum of Computing is a British museum that talks about how computing came to be and what we are still using today.
Zoology Museum of Barcelona includes a panoramic view of their collections and contains 360 digital renderings of over 500 animal bones to explore. Not all of the website is fully translated, so be careful.
Canadian History Museum offers a virtual tour to learn more about the history of our neighbors up north.
Arizona State Museum allows a virtual tour of four different exhibits from their pottery vault to woven arts.
Boston’s Children’s Museum is the second oldest, and one of the most influential children’s museums in the world.
Google Arts and Culture partnered with over 2,500 museums and galleries around the world to offer virtual tours of their spaces.
NASA has an e-book collection available to the public for free. Their website also contains multiple educational resources to explore.
Smithsonian Learning Lab is a major rethinking of how the digital resources from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, 9 major research centers, the National Zoo, and more, can be used together, for learning.
International Children’s Digital Library houses an online library with over 4,000 children’s books from around the world in a multitude of languages. If you are looking for tales from around the world or if you are learning a new language this is a place to stop by.
Poets.org has a large selections of poems available to read, including poem-a-day. Check out their selection, fall in love with a few new poems and maybe sign up for their poem-a-day newsletter. April is National Poetry Month, so maybe you should start thinking of how to celebrate.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Access old radio shows, early computer games, T.V. shows and over 23 million books.
Digital Public Library of America is a collection of digital copies of original materials from various university libraries around the US.
Library of Congress Digital Collections has multiple collections available online, consisting of over 2 million scans of historic books, photos and other materials. This includes a large selection of historic children’s books, Abraham Lincoln’s Papers and a collection of Folk songs from Michigan and Wisconsin.
Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Digital Collections contains millions of images, books, maps, recordings, documents, and more from across the UW, Wisconsin and the world. Enjoy learning more about our state’s past by browsing this collection.
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. While many books on HathiTrust requires an institutional membership, reading online is free.
American Archive of Public Broadcasting allows viewing of historic programs of publicly funded radio and television across America.
Coloring Nature focuses mainly on animals and natural scenes.
Just Color will provide multiple themed coloring pages for you to print off.
Top Coloring Pages has more than 2000 great quality, printable and completely free coloring pages for children and their parents.
Super Coloring will provide multiple themed free coloring pages for you to print off. Does contain ads.
Crayola provides free coloring pages for adults and kids.
#ColorourCollections was launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016. #ColorOurCollections is an annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their collections.The coloring books from 2020 and previous years remain accessible year-round for free download.
Misc. Fun!
I’m a Puzzle lets you upload a photo to make an online jigsaw puzzle. Make it harder for adults or easier for kids.
Brain Games is a series of experiments, using illusions and man-on-the-street demonstrations. Host Jason Silva and guest experts unlock the science behind the mysteries of why we say, eat, feel and act as we do with episodes on topics ranging from memory and common sense, to morality and the paranormal. Through an intricate series of interactive experiments designed to mess with your mind, we reveal the inner-workings of your brain. Hailed by critics as “tremendous fun” that “makes science entertaining,” Brain Games turns your mind’s eye inwards for a fascinating journey into the three and a half pounds of tissue that makes you… you.
How Stuff Works is an award-winning educational site that provides historical information about many age-appropriate topics (these topics include, but aren’t limited to, animals, culture, automobiles, politics, money, science, and entertainment). Articles use simple terms to be accessible to a wide age range.
Kennedy Center Quality arts education resources in Washington, D.C. Spark curiosity, build empathy, and embolden citizen artistry.
Driving-Tests.org is a free driver education program that contains: 11 car practice tests, 9 motorcycle practice tests, 10 CDL practice tests, 3 online driver’s manuals (car, motorcycle, CDL), a FAQ section with detailed answers to 100+ DMV related questions, and road sign practice. Spanish versions are also included.
Driving tests: https://dmv-permit-test.com/wisconsin/epl/practice-test-1.htmlMotorcycle: https://dmv-permit-test.com/wisconsin/epl/motorcycle-test-1.htmlCDL: https://dmv-permit-test.com/wisconsin/epl/cdl-practice-test-1.htmlRoad Signs and Meanings: https://dmv-permit-test.com/epl/road-signsRoad Signs Test: https://dmv-permit-test.com/epl/road-signs/test.html
CollegeBoard.com offers a full length SAT practice test and scoring guide.
ACT Test Prep includes ACT prep, sample test questions, calculator tips, career planning and more.
BLS Career Information helps teens get information about careers that might interest them based on their favorite subjects in school.
Private College Zone is an online resource to help students and their families select a college, apply for admission and plan to finance higher education.
University of Wisconsin links to Wisconsin’s public university system.
Tech Schools is a resource to learn about Wisconsin’s technical colleges.
Edx was founded by Harvard and MITand houses multiple college level courses available for free.
Coursera offers both free and paid courses online. Certificates are only available in paid courses, but you can still learn something new for free.
Khan Academy has trusted, standards-aligned practice and lessons covering math K-12 through early college, grammar, science, history, AP®, SAT®, and more. It’s all free for learners and teachers.
Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. This site collects multiple free education resources for anyone to use for free.
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
OpenLearn courses are free to study. They offer nearly 1000 free courses across 8 different subject areas and are available to start right away.
Helping Writers Become Authors is a blog style website created by a published author to help others on their writing journey. Contains helpful guides on how to tackle tough writers block and how to start writing on your own.
List of College Courses on Writing has put together a list of free online college courses on creative writing. They cover a variety of topics and will help walk you through the writing process.
Historical Resources
Reading like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills.
Atlas of the Geography of the United States is a dynamic map of the United States showing not only how states have changed and grown, but also the growth of churches, population and much more have moved throughout the early days of our country. Take a glance at the introductory video before diving in.
American Panorama – Similar to the above atlas, but with a more diverse selection of maps encompassing everything from canal growth and use to the changes in our House of Representatives.
Emergency Info for Teens in Crisis
Positive Alternatives/Teen Care – Where Teens and Families Get Help Fast
Sites in River Falls and Menomonie offer a wide range of youth and family services.
24 hours a day, 7 days a week
24 Hour Crisis Hotline: 1.800.491.8336
River Falls Location:
Positive Alternatives
2860 Williams Avenue – River Falls, WI 54022 – 715.426.2224 – http://positive-alternatives.org/
Menomonie Location:
Positive Alternatives
603 Terrill Road – Menomonie, WI 54751 – 715.235.9552 – http://positive-alternatives.org/
Pierce County Human Services
https://www.co.pierce.wi.us/departments/human_services/mental_health.phphttp://www.co.pierce.wi.us/Human%20Services/Mental_Health.html offers outpatient, prevention, crisis intervention, emergency care, and referrals. Immediate assistance is available 24 hours a day for all emergencies.
24 hour help: Call 988
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24 hours a day and will connect you to a skilled, trained counselor at a crisis center in your area.
988 Suicide & Crisis Hotline
Call: 988
The Trevor Project – Suicide prevention for LGBTQA+ youth
Call: 866-488-7386
Text: START to 678-678
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