Integrated instruction may be everyone's ideal, but it is the reality in few classrooms. This review of existing literature examines research to determine why this ideal may be infrequently realized. The review concluded that the mismatch between ideal and practice may be at least partially explained by the ambiguity in definitions in the…

This paper contains some hands-on activities that relate science to art and language arts. The focus is placed on middle schools and activities engage students in the discovery that chemicals are used to draw and color. Students also read and write poetry and literature that employ science-related topics. A number of spin-off activities are…

This Digest discusses teaching interdisciplinary thematic units in language arts, noting that such units typically integrate broad areas of knowledge, such as social studies, mathematics, or ecology with the teaching of the four major language skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The Digest presents a definition and rationale for…

The use of portfolios is a rather recent innovation in teaching the language arts. A characteristic of the portfolio process is that students are led to notice their own progress through the work included in the portfolio. Many educators welcome the portfolio process because they recognize that standardized tests do not tell enough about what…

This article describes a project in which the reality and importance of newspaper production was integrated into the language arts curriculum in a second-grade classroom. Both a print- and a multimedia-based class newspaper were produced using the Student Writing Center software and HyperStudio. The activity involved the input of a university…

Test publishers have promoted their commercially available norm-referenced achievement tests as viable solutions to assessment challenges faced by states. They argue that their tests are developed professionally and therefore possess sound psychometric properties not often found in state-specific efforts. This study compared judgments from two…

The purpose of this study was to compare the achievement of students in 14 Pascagoula schools and 9 Biloxi schools implementing School Renaissance (SR) to those of students in matched Control schools. The achievement measures to be examined were from the 2003 administration of the Mississippi Curriculum Test (MCT) for Reading, Language Arts, and…

This textbook book is an English course intended for use during the seventh and eighth grades and provides for study along both lines of language work, grammar and composition. The book includes a section on dictionary use. The final chapter is devoted to word analysis and was designed especially for the benefit of that great majority of grammar…

This textbook is designed to meet all the requirements for language teaching in the second school year. It contains exercises in spelling, transcription, dictation, and the rapid recognition of words frequently met in the young pupil's reading, as well as illustrated short stories and suggestions for conversation lessons.

Discusses a unit in which students rewrite Ray Bradbury's short stories into short plays, emphasizing the importance of dialog. (RB)

Examines a program in which college students visited and taught creative dramatics to elementary school students. (RB)

Presents a rationale for teaching creative dramatics and suggests that it can be an important avenue for self-exploration and discovery since it involves the self physically and emotionally, as well as verbally and cognitively. (RB)

Reports on a study to determine the effect of creative drama on the role playing skills of sixth graders. (RB)

Provides a brief sketch on the teaching of creative dramatics in the elementary school and reviews fourteen ERIC documents which deal with this subject. (RB)

Urges classroom teachers to examine the current language research and dialect discoveries in order to teach effectively.