Health and Careers Research Project

A grade 8 class will be visiting the library soon to do a research project on diseases caused by unhealthy living. In addition to all the books and reference items that will be set aside in the library for research purposes, I also wanted to list here some good health websites to look at to flesh out your research.

Kidshealth.org is an easy to use website from Nemours. The teen section has a lot more information about some of the diseases you will be studying, but the kid's page also has a very easy to use and simple dictionary of medical terms which is a great reference if you come across a medical term in your research that is unfamiliar.
http://kidshealth.org/teen/

If you have a public library card, you can access a great database for teens all about health and wellness. Under online resources (http://www.fvrl.bc.ca/learn/online_resources.htm#health) go to the Teen Health and Wellness Centre and enter your account information to log in, and they have simple and reliable information about various diseases, infections, and conditions (choose this link on the sidebar from the home-page, then find your disease in the alphabetical listing). One great thing about this database is that when you find an article you want to use for your research, on the left side of the page there is a button "Cite this article" that you can click and will give you the proper formatting to add to your bibliography.

The Mayo clinic also has a comprehensive alphabetical listing of diseases, so find your disease and get an overview including symptoms, causes, risk factors, and treatment.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/DiseasesIndex/DiseasesIndex

MedlinePlus also has a extensive medical encyclopedia which includes pictures and diagrams.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/encyclopedia.html

I hope you find these resources helpful for your research, and you can know that they are reliable web resources for your topic.