Lists recommended book titles for children on art, crafts, artists, optical illusions, and drawing. Provides the address for a Web site featuring art activities and information about artists for children. (PEN)

Investigates language learners beliefs about their experiences with different types of classroom activities, specifically teacher-fronted activities and student-centered pairwork activities. Discusses the usefulness of studying learners' beliefs about their learning experiences, their perceptions of affective and learning outcomes from these…

Discusses how four picture books, "Granpa,""The Tunnel,""The Wolf," and "Shortcut," provide the stimulus for children to become more effective readers through the use of sophisticated literary strategies. Explores some of the "gap-filling" required of readers as they deal with the indeterminacies…

Discusses the use of double meanings and figurative language or figures of speech in literature and how confusing it can be for beginning readers. Describes class activities that can help students construct, examine, and extend the meaning of what they read and includes a worksheet, evaluation suggestions, and extension activities. (LRW)

Describes a Montessori class project involving the building of a model of the ancient Briton monument, Stonehenge. Illustrates how the flexibility of the Montessori elementary curriculum encourages children to make their own toys and learn from the process. (JPB)

Discusses the use of virtual field trips based on experiences in a grade 6 science classroom. Considers cost effectiveness, lists online resources, and includes a chart and descriptions of 11 specific virtual field trip sites suitable for elementary and secondary school classes. (LRW)

How well does competitive theory explain the outcome in experimental markets? The authors examined the results of a large number of classroom trading experiments that used a pit-trading design found in Experiments with Economic Principles, an introductory economics textbook by Bergstrom and Miller. They compared experimental outcomes with…

The language arts classroom is largely about leading students to become literate in their own voices and to see writing as a tool for thinking. I come to know my students through their writing and through class discussions about the texts we read and the texts we write. The challenge of good writing instruction is leading students to view their…

A great deal of research has been done on the different ways students learn. Over twenty years ago, Gardner (1983) introduced the theory of multiple intelligences. According to Gardner, each individual possesses at least eight different intelligences, each with varied abilities. The eight intelligences are identified as linguistic,…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which naturalistic practices were being implemented across a representative sample of 17 early intervention programs and classroom activities. Measures of teacher-child communicative interactions, program quality, specialized training, and ongoing support were administered. Results indicated…

New teachers expect many things in educational life to be complex (e.g., classroom management, lesson planning, administrative paperwork, relationships with colleagues and students' parents), they still underestimate the amount of detail that goes into creating effective learning experiences daily. Field trips, for example, always sound like a…

Eleanor Roosevelt could be called a Superstar First Lady. In the era when women's suffrage was first being exercised, she was "pushing the envelope" of what the President's wife, and women in general, might be expected to do in civic life. She wrote syndicated columns for magazines and newspapers, the most famous of which was entitled "My Day," a…

P.A.C.E.S. stands for Participation, Appearance, Cleanup, Engineering, and Safety. The author has traditionally used design briefs to set the limits on processes and materials to solve a given problem. The design brief brings out all kinds of "out of the box" thinking, with many correct answers to solve the problem. The P.A.C.E.S. rubric ties the…

Science fairs offer students the opportunity to develop skills in inquiry, writing research proposals, working with peers, verifying results, and sharing experimental findings. However, the science fair itself does not necessarily translate into a student's attainment of such skills. Project quality and a student's successful achievement of good…

Phase changes and intermolecular forces are important physical science concepts but are not always easy to present in an active learning format. This article presents several interactive activities in which students plot the melting points of some fatty acids and explore the effect that the nanoscale size and shape of molecules have on the…