Describes life in the Mojave Desert. Includes a map of the desert and a poster that can be used in the classroom with drawings and photographs of desert creatures. Presents three lesson plans on mapping deserts, earthshaking events, and weed invaders as well as a section of teacher resources. (SAH)

Shows how a writing exercise requiring students to write to themselves five years into the future has a dramatic effect on them and helps them, perhaps for the first time, to think about their futures. (TB)

Describes two writing assignments that may be used to make Shakespeare more approachable and understandable: first a paraphrase of a passage, and second a memo to an actor interpreting the same passage. (TB)

Describes a series of exercises designed to help students of technical writing to see the virtues of revision. Suggests that students may learn from finding sections of their own textbooks that they can revise both linguistically and graphically. (TB)

An education professor explains how she uses her own lesson plans for a course in middle-grade methods to demonstrate lesson planning for students. She uses an entrance table with handouts to illustrate time-saving classroom techniques. Seeing and experiencing generally beats telling. (MLH)

Reviews Web sites for current events news that are appropriate for students of various ages. Discusses the possibilities for second language learning and curriculum connections and lists television sites, news magazines, classroom magazines, newspapers, and lesson plans. (LRW)

Points out the potential of biology for implementing media reports as primary literature and presents an example of this approach using the topic "corn transformed with bacterial genes that encode insecticidal Bt toxins and public concerns over its potential impact on human health and the environment". (Contains 22 references.) (YDS)

Two special educators share their experiences in developing standards-based lessons to help students manage their own Individualized Education Programs. They describe strategies used to begin the process, provide a sample unit lesson plan, and show how a typical 50-minute class period could be structured to incorporate self-determination skills.…

Discusses an approach to teaching heterogeneous English-as-a-Second/Foreign-Language classes. Draws on classroom research data to describe the features of a success-building lesson context. (Author/VWL)

Describes a lesson plan designed for first- through fifth-grade students in which they made their own impressionist-style artworks. Explains that the lesson was introduced with a discussion on Claude Monet, his many art prints, and the impressionist genre. Explores the differences between things of nature and man-made objects. Notes materials and…

Encourages readers to look at traditional translation activities in a positive and innovative light. A detailed lesson plan is offered, showing how back translation can be exploited with a monolingual class, whether or not the teacher speaks the students' mother tongue. (Author/VWL)

Shows how a common demonstration that consists of slowly heating sulfur powder in a test tube to illustrate sulfur's allotropic modifications can convince students of conclusions about the moon Io which they often find surprising. Describes the demonstration in full. (Author/MM)

Prospective secondary mathematics teachers lack images of "reformed" teaching that engage students in experimenting, analyzing, conjecturing, justifying, and making connections. The development and investigation of experiences fostering reform-oriented teaching are needed. This study investigated microteaching lesson study (MLS), an experience…

School to Career is part of a national initiative to help students make connections between the content, skills, and concepts they are learning in the classroom and careers in the real world. School-to-career practices add relevance to the elementary school curriculum and promote engagement in learning. A key feature of many school-to-career…

For several years, advocacy groups have recognized the need to strengthen financial education in the K-12 schools. Current statistics support their concerns. Financial illiteracy in the United States is astoundingly high. From 1992 to 2000, disposable personal income for Americans rose by 47 percent, but personal spending rose by 61 percent. In…