This classroom exercise illustrates the Tiebout (1956) hypothesis that residential sorting across multiple jurisdictions leads to a more efficient allocation of local public goods. The exercise places students with heterogeneous preferences over a public good into a single classroom community. A simple voting mechanism determines the level of…

This study reports on the strategies (overt and subtle) employed by students in one senior secondary school in Botswana to keep their teachers in an information-giving position. Contrary to the prevailing view that the 'teacher dominance' of classroom activities so often reported in classroom studies results from teachers' desire for social…

Winter, even if students don't see snowflakes, is a good time to examine the activities of animals, children, and nature. In this column, the author recommends pairs of fiction and nonfiction titles that can meet the needs of students from kindergarten to grade 5, as well as fulfill the requirements of the curriculum. Some winter activities are…

This column presents a brief biography of author Seymour Simon, whose topics for children's photo essays include icebergs, gorillas, thunderstorms, optical illusions, snakes, air, water, planets, airplanes, volcanoes, cars, the brain, bridges, bugs, crocodiles, skyscrapers, sharks, and paper airplanes. Though he is best known in the style and an…

Poetry functions as an instructive tool across the curriculum. To use this extraordinary tool, we must engage in our own creative journey with poetry by reading it, writing poetry, and finding inspiration in a new approach. How do we read a poem? Is there a correct format to explain poetic imagery? Can young children be introduced to poetry and…

Believing that all children should have their multiple intelligences nurtured, these authors planned and implemented a set of learning experiences that would engage each of these capacities for the children in this kindergarten classroom (Figure 1). This study of ladybugs gave children the opportunity to learn in at least eight different ways-all…

Providing sun-safe environments, schedules, and activities; teaching and modeling sun-safe behaviors; and implementing a sun-safe school policy are ways that schools can help protect children from sun overexposure and lay the foundation for a healthy lifestyle at an early age. This article presents the SunWise program and examples of classroom…

The article describes an activity for the author's fifth-grade students called "build the strongest mountain." To them, it was not a lesson--it was a challenge. To the author, it was an activity that turned a run-of-the-mill Earth science unit into a terrific opportunity for students to demonstrate their knowledge of erosion and develop…

This article describes an activity that one science teacher uses with her eighth grade class on the first day of school. Wanting to start the year off "right" (whatever that is), this teacher purposely plans to model the thinking behavior she expects from her students and to let them have some fun to settle those first-day jitters. She also wants…

In this article, we present two studies that helped us understand the kinds of support that students need to learn science successfully from design activities. Both were enacted in the context of an approach to learning science from design called learning by design (LBD). In our first study, we designed and integrated a paper-and-pencil…

An activity which stresses on identifying features of functions like the rate of change, intercepts, local and global behavior, zeros and asymptotes is designed to increase the level of understanding of the students and also to clear any doubts that they might have. The students are then asked to make a summary of what was discussed in the class,…

In this article, the author shares some of the activities for the classroom invented by Gill Hatch. One of those activities is the activity for older students, which is for the five-year-olds through to post-graduates. Card-sorting game, geometry games, algebra games, and loop games are also some of those activities for the classroom invented by…

The United States is undergoing rapid demographic change leading to growing racial, ethnic, religious and economic diversity in our classrooms. Our students can be sensitized to this growing diversity through exposure to the concept of social justice. The purpose of this article is to provide examples of how social justice issues can be included…

The case of Well Wishes involves students in a thorough examination of the interaction among nitrogen-composed species in the septic systems and well water, which helps to clean household water. The case supports the attainment of five goals for students, and can be analyzed through classroom discussions or laboratory experiments.

An exercise that provides a hands-on demonstration of the hydrolysis of aspirin is presented. The key to understanding the hydrolysis is recognizing that all six process may occur simultaneously and that the observed rate constant is the sum of the rate constants that one rate constant dominates the overall process.