"Soil, Seeds, and the Pumpkin Patch!" is an integrated unit designed to provide elementary school teachers with ideas for using hands-on activities, fostering inquiry and valuable discussion, and using technology as a learning tool. This unit integrates science with language arts, mathematics, literature, and technology. During this unit, students…

Although the teaching of photosynthesis occurs yearly in elementary classrooms, one thing that makes it challenging is the inclusion of English language learners (ELLs). This article presents several activities for teaching and assessing of photosynthesis in a third grade classroom. The activities incorporate the photosynthesis content, teaching…

For curriculum content-related reasons, inquiry activities can be difficult in classrooms unless the activities are approached in a manner that makes variations among student group findings understandable in the context of the study. Studies of individual animals and plant reactions to stimuli, such as insect exploratory behavior, allow the…