Take one look at SIRS Discoverer®, and you'll understand-we designed it with young researchers in mind. The colorful interface is intuitive and easy-to-use for even the youngest students who are hard at work developing their research, writing, language, and computer skills.

Students love the colorful buttons and simple navigation system. But Discoverer is more than a user-friendly interface. Once students click a button, the real genius of Discoverer becomes apparent. It offers articles and images from 1,900+ domestic and international magazines, newspapers, U.S. government documents, and websites-all carefully selected for their educational content reliability, relevance, interest, age-appropriateness, and level of readability. Titles include: Cricket, Current Science, Highlights for Children, National Geographic Kids, Ranger Rick, Read, Scholastic magazines, Time for Kids, Weekly Reader, and Your Big Backyard.

Additionally, SIRS® Discoverer WebFind links makes Discoverer one of the safest online experiences for younger students. Following SIRS' time-tested techniques for vetting and organizing information, each site is carefully selected for its relevance, credibility, appropriateness to students, and reliability before it's added to WebFind. Each site includes an editor-written summary to help users quickly evaluate a site's content and mission prior to linking. How reliable are the 9,000+ destinations in Discoverer WebFind? In a word, very.

Special software monitors website content changes throughout the day. When a change is detected, the site is removed from the product until personally reviewed by our staff to ensure compliance to our rigorous standards. Plus, our rigorous editorial process ensures sites are educational in nature, noncommercial, and free from overt advertising.

For all sources, users can easily retrieve information by subject heading, subject tree, and keyword searches. The articles are indexed according to Library of Congress-derived subject headings to ensure the best results can be printed, saved, and e-mailed.

Documents are assigned a reading level (easy, moderate, or challenging) based on content, interest, and readability. And because it includes middle and elementary curriculum topics, Discoverer can be easily integrated into classroom activities of all kinds. Lexile Reading Levels have also been integrated into the product. Lexile scores match reader ability and text difficulty, allowing individualized monitoring of student progress.

Plus, state and national standards search help educators locate standards-aligned articles and other resources, which saves teachers time in the lesson- planning process, and ensures that library resources are correlated directly to learning benchmarks. Lexile Reading Levels have also been integrated into the product. Lexile scores match reader ability and text difficulty, allowing individualized monitoring of student progress.

Young students will find everything they need to complete assignments and learn more about their favorite topics, in such features as:

• Discoverer's Subject Tree helps kids browse hundreds of topics of interest to young readers, including Animals, Cultures, Health & Human Body, Notable People, and Personal Growth.
• SIRS® Discoverer WebFind complements Discoverer with more than 9,000 prescreened weblinks to the latest information on varied topic areas and ever-changing fields.
• Discoverer's Top Pick features articles and images selected by the SIRS research team for their exceptional interest and research value.
• Current Events contains full-text articles and images, with timely information concerning worldwide events.
• Spotlight of the Month presents a sampling of articles to encourage research and awareness of a monthly topic, chosen for its timeliness and high interest.
• The World Almanac for Kids provides facts and information on a variety of topics and is searchable by keyword and through a table of contents.
• An integrated encyclopedia delivers over 26,000 articles on a wide variety of subjects including science, geography, history, nations of the world, arts and humanities, sports, pets, hobbies, and biographies.
• Suggested Research Topics offers keywords, subject headings, and topic browse paths that link directly to coverage of hot topics and timely issues.
• Country Facts features facts on nearly 200 countries, including colorful maps, flags, statistics, languages, and more. It also includes profiles and graphics on every U.S. state and Canadian province and territories.
• Challenge Quests are presented monthly and pose insightful questions with answers in the form of pathfinders, to encourage student research.
• Maps of the World provides hundreds of detailed, printable maps, including each of the 50 United States; the provinces and territories of Canada; as well as nations and regions of the world. It also includes U.S. Historical, World Historical, and Outline Maps.
• Other database features include integrated activities, biographies, fiction, photo essays, and a pictures search, plus a dictionary and thesaurus.