The Confidence Course is a program of physical activities which seeks to improve individual self-image and to develop initiative and resourcefulness while promoting feelings of trust and good will within a group. General guidelines and procedures include safety considerations as well as common sense in activity selection and a perspective of…

In developing critical reading, humor may contribute to three broad categories of skills: discerning the author's purpose, inferencing, and evaluating content. Passages from children's books such as "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" or "The Great Brain" can help to illustrate the need for teachers and students to thoughtfully…

Concern over the poor and illegible handwriting of the students in Somalia led to the development of this handwriting manual for primary school teachers to: (1) give teachers guidance in teaching handwriting; (2) help teachers in the methodology of teaching handwriting; (3) let teachers know the easier ways of making cheap and obtainable materials…

In the foreword to this book, Inhelder states that its essential contribution is that "it transposed to actual reality Piaget's central epistemological thesis according to which mathematical thought is, from its most elementary manifestations, the product of the subject's activity that he characterized by the term 'reflective…

A Community Thinkers' Tournament uses existing communications and instructional gaming technology to make available to participating community members a learning network for enhancing fundamental reasoning skills. Experience with this program, as it has operated in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the Watts area of Los Angeles over a two-year period, shows…

The first section of this booklet describes a six-week summer workshop designed for children, ages five to thirteen, who have moderate to serious learning problems. In the morning session, teachers worked with the children individually or in small groups. In the afternoon, teachers assessed student abilities and devised individualized instruction…

The articles in this document present ideas for teaching English and the language arts creatively. Topics include a letter writing project in which ninth graders wrote letters to celebrities; an English elective course designed to increase students' creativity; ways of using the newspaper to teach language skills; the value of games in teaching…

This report is an educational guide for parents of young children with reading problems. It explains the prereading skills, such as sitting quietly, paying attention, and listening, that must be mastered before a child can learn to read and then describes nine approaches used by public schools for teaching reading. The report offers practical ways…

Twenty activities are described that can be used to develop map and compass skills in elementary grades. The activities range from simple, beginners' projects to more complex tasks as students acquire more skills. Most can be carried out in the classroom, schoolyard, or local neighborhood. Map activities include drawing maps of the classroom,…

This document consists of two modules. The first studies a variety of multicandidate voting systems, including approval, Borda, and cumulative voting, using a model which takes account of a voter's intensity of preference for candidates. The voter's optimal strategy is investigated for each voting system using decision criteria under uncertainty…

Designed as an aid to teachers who are planning, implementing, or modifying a spelling program, this guide lists 95 games and activities for enhancing student attitudes and reinforcing the development of specific skills. The activities provide work on phonics, vocabulary development, the dictionary (alphabetization), imagery, proofreading, and…

Reflections are offered on the challenge of teaching a foreign language to academically gifted adolescents. At the introductory levels, able students are impatient with materials that are too simplistic. To hold their attention, they need exercises that involve choice, complex structural changes, and creativity. Colloquial dialogues and culturally…

Designed to assist teachers in small schools with the improvement of curriculum and instruction and to help smaller districts without curriculum personnel to comply with Washington's Student Learning Objectives (SLO) Law, this guide contains spelling curriculum materials for grades K-3. The spelling section is part of the total language arts…

Among the justifications for using games in foreign language teaching, one finds the theory that games play an important role in the instructional and learning processes and that they can be designed to develop linguistic skills and communicative abilities. A review of several authors not only suggests the value of games and game-like activities…

The document contains 10 author contributed chapters (in four languages) which resulted from a 1976 international symposium on problems concerning the preschool education of blind children and the guidance of their parents. Chapters have the following titles (with authors and nationality in parentheses): "Development of the Blind Child"…