Here’s a site you’ll soon be “buzzing” about http://www.muskol.com

Although this site by Muskol is clearly a retail site, there’s a lot of great information you can access without the advertising getting in the way. When you first enter the Muskol address, you see one lone mosquito fly across your screen. In a few minutes more mosquitoes join in and you can watch them fly over the Muskol logo. This is a cute introduction, but there is a skip intro button provided if you choose to go directly to the homepage. From the homepage, you can access information about different activities including fishing, camping, golfing and gardening. Each area provides information on how to reduce the chance of being bitten by mosquitoes during this activity, as well as tips on how to improve your skills and interesting links.

On every page, you can also see little cartoon clips called “Bug Bytes”. These are an excellent source of information written in very simple English. Each Bug Byte is one to three sentences long and changes randomly every few minutes. These Bug Bytes can be saved as “GIF” images and printed from a word processing document for further use in the classroom. Another good use of the Bug Bytes is to create questions for the students to answer by readingthe information provided in the various clips.

The Bug Forecaster is a really interesting way to introduce your students to regions in Canada, locating places on a map and hyper linking. Once you click on the Bug Forecaster Button, a map appears on the right-hand side of the screen with a small paragraph of easy to read instructions on the left. The Bug Forecaster shows the probability of being bitten by mosquitoes in the selected region for the following three days. These forecasts are updated daily. To use this resource, first you choose a country -- Canada or the U.S. Then you click on the region you want the forecast for. Once you click on a region, a magnified picture of that area will appear in the window. On this enlarged map, you will see circles representing cities or areas. You click on one of these city buttons to get the forecast. The forecast appears on the bottom lefthand side of the screen. The next three days are shown with circles that are colour coded and contain one, two or three mosquitoes based on a low, medium or high probability of being bitten.

With all of the useful information available at www.muskol.com, we know that you and your students will be itching to try it!

Canada.com Canada.com is a good place to look for Canadian information on topics such as travel, health, autos, careers, finance, news, shopping and sports. Although not all of the material is accessible to literacy students, their homepage contains information about the weather, horoscopes and "Today in Canadian History" that is generally easy to read. Their free email service is also very uncluttered and easy to use. This site is operated by CanWest Interactive.