How can elementary students use Google Slides to enhance their math problem-solving skills and creativity? Usable Math offers slideshows that pose a problem, provide hints, and ultimately reveal a solution. The intent of these slideshows is to provide extended opportunities to understand and practice mathematics skills. In this fourth-grade…

The purpose of this article is to explore integrating nontraditional classroom art materials and allowing students to make art for nonart spaces. Art programs must stimulate creativity, innovation, and imagination; provide tools the students can use; identify a context the students can experiment within (Chang, 2015; Gude, 2010); and offer the…

The importance of design and technology (D&T) education has been advocated by numerous researchers over the last three decades. For instance, Nigel Cross suggests that in design education, there are ill-defined problems and "designerly ways of knowing" (2006). Today D&T in school education is employed globally and the common…

While the development of creativity, or creative thinking, in mathematics is considered important by many researchers, there are several difficulties in implementing creative tasks, especially before secondary school. Within the original context of a mathematical escape game, this paper reports two episodes exemplifying the difficulties met by…

In this article, a series of activities on explicit teaching of specific aspects of the 'nature of science' are presented. The authors explore teaching the nature of science through inquiry-based activities on electric circuits. The activities concern classification of objects as conductors or insulators and took place in three classes of 4th…

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) topics into K-12 school curricula is a relatively new but crucial challenge faced by education systems worldwide. Attempts to address this challenge are hindered by a serious lack of curriculum materials and tools to aid teachers in teaching AI. This article introduces the theoretical foundations and…

Art therapists use pictorial image making to help patients communicate feelings through creative expression and cope with traumatic experiences through the artistic processes (Ulman, 2001). With children, art therapy is used as a way to discern their emotional states and determine their relationships to the external world (Edwards, 2008). However,…

Rangeley Friends of the Arts (RFA) is a nonprofit arts organization in Rangeley, a town of 1,200 souls in the rural western mountains of Maine. Working with existing facilities and a largely volunteer workforce, the article explains how this group established Creative After School Arts, or CASA--a program that provides a safe home away from home…

This article describes how a federally funded afterschool program serving an elementary-age population in a rural southern community used the creative affordances of Minecraft and a creative youth development (CYD) framework to support the local school district's character education program, The Leader in Me (LiM). On receipt of a 21st Century…

In this paper, I describe a collaborative process in which a class of grade 6 & 7 students made and performed two plays, and also transformed their learning. In this process, a reconfiguring of the spaces of learning, the students and I adapted a variety of literacy and drama practices; a key change in practice was the shift away from an…

Project-based learning presents an opportunity to engage both struggling students and high-achieving students. A special education teacher and a principal describe how this worked in one school by sharing the stories of two very different elementary school students. The high-achieving student learned to be more creative and take risks; the…

This article outlines a research study focused on the connections between natural science and art. In the instructional unit designed for the research study, multiple art forms were utilized, in order to reach multiple types of learners. Interdisciplinary, or integrated art instruction is a way to enhance understanding of and the connections…

This article describes a teacher-research project in which a class of fifth-grade English language learners demonstrated that learning about photography and using it as inspiration for their creative writing authenticated their writing task, helped them bring their outside-school worlds inside school, increased their enthusiasm for writing, and…

The intent of this article is to share valuable discoveries about fifth grade students' reading comprehension as well as their creative growth in a classroom environment that infused a variety of creative and critical thinking activities into a four-week study of "Tuck Everlasting" (Babbitt 1975), a rich fantasy meditation on the…

Elementary students are often hampered by a tendency to ascribe innovation to increasing human intelligence or individual agency rather than increased information, better access to information, or collective and institutional agency. As a result, they struggle to build evidence-based interpretations of the distant past. A fifth-grade…