For four months, St. Paul's Episcopal School in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana remained closed after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the entire city in August 2005. The storm left St. Paul's campus under nine feet of water for two weeks, destroying many buildings and the entire first floor of the campus. As the only remaining art…

Technology and invention are an integral part of the elementary school science curriculum, addressed by national standards. Student drawings of scientists have been studied extensively, but little is known of student mental conceptions and drawings of inventors. To uncover student's images of inventors, ninety preservice elementary teachers at a…

The present study compared the representational drawings of children with autism, children with Down syndrome and typically developing children. Participants were asked to draw a series of objects and their depictions were scored for the incidence of intellectual realism. The tasks sought evidence of conceptual as opposed to episodic influences on…

The literature was reviewed and summarized to provide common interpretations of human figure drawings. Basic guidelines for interpreting human figure drawings (i.e., face and head, body, arms and hands, and legs and feet) are presented. Expectations for students at different developmental levels (ages 1 1/2 through adolescence) are identified, and…

The genre of tall tales is characterized by fictional, often intentionally ridiculous, stories that provide a reason for or origin of a natural phenomenon. Tall tales are often based on characters who are unusually adept or powerful; they are particularly appealing to children who are cognitively capable of understanding the tongue-in-cheek humor…

This article deals with the results and further consequences of my empirical investigation of Christian-Muslim families and their children in Germany. It gives an insight into the religious world of 4- to 12-year-old children in Christian-Muslim families through the analysis of evaluated interviews and drawings concerning religious practice and…

This article examines the perspective of disengaged Grade 6 male students about learning. Nine students were observed and interviewed to identify their views on good learning and on being in control of learning. The boys perceived good learners as quick, smart workers who could achieve high grades; and that being in control was about knowing how…

This inquiry-based lesson was inspired by Denise Fleming's book entitled, "In the Tall, Tall Grass" (1991). The author used the book and a real study of prairie grasses to teach kindergartners how to make careful observations and record what they see. In addition, they learn how to "draw as scientists." Here the author describes her class's yearly…

This intervention study tested whether invented spelling plays a causal role in learning to read. Three groups of kindergarten children (mean age = 5 years 7 months) participated in a 4-week intervention. Children in the invented-spelling group spelled words as best they could and received developmentally appropriate feedback. Children in the 2…

This study investigates learning outcomes of four-year-old children at a preschool in P. R. China. The children are educated in a school ecology designed to address cognitive, social, linguistic and psychological development, where an instructional technique, "Integrating Thinking, Art and Language" (ITAL), is applied to support them in…

The National Institute for Trauma and Loss in Children (TLC) conducted research on the use of Structured Sensory Interventions for Traumatized Children, Adolescents, and Parents (SITCAP). The use of SITCAP was evaluated in two programs, one working with traumatized children 6-12 years of age called the I Feel Better Now! Program and another called…

This article describes a metaphorical imaging activity used in World Educational Links (WEL), a graduate teacher certification program, to help future social justice educators explore their relationship with society and their sense of interconnectedness and empowerment to effect change. The author investigates possibilities inherent in the…

In this paper, the findings of a study investigating four-year-old children's perspectives on the roles that male and female teachers fulfil in a kindergarten setting are presented. The purpose of this study was to discover if the gender of a teacher impacts on children's perspectives of their teachers' roles and whether boys' and girls'…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how multimodal assessment tools enabled Grade 2 students to show knowledge and understanding of wolves. The research design was a case study across three years employing descriptive statistics to portray student knowledge and understanding associated with the use of each tool. The findings indicate that…

This dissertation is an inquiry into the experiences and beliefs of six Russian-speaking immigrant teachers, including myself, about the role of a teacher. We were all brought up and educated in the former republics of the Soviet Union and arrived in the United States at different times after its collapse in 1991. Our experiences of living in…