Provides activities for the study of light as a theme for December, which encompasses Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. Includes science activities and suggested books for children and teachers. (HTH)

Describes mapping, a collaborative activity to stimulate discussion or summarize learning. (SR)

Examines three classroom techniques for facilitating actor/filmmaker collaborative scriptwriting situations: improvisation, "contentless scenes" used to develop notions of subtext, and beat analyses (breaking scripts into character beats) used by directors to create characters that come alive on the screen. (SR)

Outlines the essential conditions of cooperative learning. Describes six cooperative learning structures modeled in a reading methods class that can be used to create literacy activities appropriate in fourth through sixth grade. (SR)

Discusses an approach to teaching diversity in the business communication classroom and describes class activities that connect traditional classroom activities with diversity and the world of work. (SR)

Describes a writing assignment in a business communication class in which students, in previously designated study groups, discover for themselves the complex interaction between a writer and an audience by becoming the president, vice president, and manager of operations of a company, and solve a problem that they can handle only through memos.…

Describes a class debate assignment that helps students prepare for writing their first research paper by making the research process a known entity. (SR)

Focuses on electronic mail topics relevant to business communication. Argues that students need training in understanding electronic organizational hierarchy and electronic communication volume and costs; selecting the appropriate media; and evaluating message permanence, security, ownership, and privacy. Appends 11 exercises. (SR)

Describes methods for gaining student involvement and participation in reading a lengthy piece of literature in a high school English classroom. Discusses the use of videotaping, role playing, the precis, the double-entry notebook, various writing exercises, and integration with other content areas. (SR)

Advocates a strategy for developing students' ability to think critically by involving them in tasks with perceived conflicts and discrepancies, starting with ads for common products and moving on to news reports and variants of literature. (SR)

Play dough is the perfect medium for creating, observing, and thinking about change. Whether the use of play dough is seen as play or a demonstration of physics, through its use children learn about transformations of consistency, color, and identity; and teachers observe how young children learn. (LB)

Despite problems of skill definition and implementation, educators are now being urged to incorporate higher order thinking skills and instruction into their classrooms. A primary barrier is teachers' orientation toward covering or dispensing knowledge, rather than working with it. The current teacher-dominated format must change to a more…

Presents nine short pieces written by teachers describing how they relate the visual arts to language learning in their classrooms. (SR)

Describes an activity that demonstrates the use of the spreadsheet as a tool to handle lower level mathematics (computations), freeing students and teacher to focus on the higher level concepts in the problems. (SR)

Provides a nine-item list of teacher developed materials relating to the social studies curriculum that may be found in the ERIC database. Includes materials on teaching methods, student activities, and museum resources. Explains how to locate and obtain materials from the ERIC system. (DK)