Music education in the United States aims to be for every child, yet many students become less interested in school music as they mature. Although previous research reveals activities that upper-elementary students may prefer, much of this research may not represent 21st-century students, the instruments and activities that have enhanced curricula…

This article describes a hands-on geometric tiling art activity used in two third-grade classes and four fifth-grade classes in a rural public elementary school with class sizes of around 20 students each. The lesson investigates concepts in geometry, number sense, and probability. Examples of student work and takeaways for other teachers…

This article describes the two types of reasoning in fraction conceptions that students often use, "gap" and "missing piece," and one that the authors aspire their students to reach, "residual." Each of these types of reasoning are underpinned by a different conception of fractions. Students who use "gap…

In this article, the authors discuss one lesson with 20 third-grade students at a public school in a suburban community of the midwestern region of the United States. Because this was the first time implementing the Snowboarding Spins and Flips activity, four teachers were in the room. One was the main teacher of the lesson while the other three…

Throughout the country, there are many bodies of fresh water affected by algal blooms. By focusing on a water source near their school, students can become scientists, too. Situating science content in real and meaningful learning experiences encourages students to be invested in their own learning, construct deeper understandings, and apply those…

To foster students' meaningful learning of science, we designed and implemented a unit for five third-grade students that allowed them to understand Carbon Footprint (CF) in a public school in North Texas. The unit lasted seven weeks, where students identified the effects of distance traveled and packaging on the CF of certain consumable products.…

In this article, the author presents a short teaching sequence to show how to introduce young students in grades 3 (ages 8-9) and 4 (ages 9-10) to using digital tools for exploring larger and multivariate data sets. The teacher guided the young students from creating bar graphs in small data sets on embodied cognition and enactive levels to…

Let's say you are a Grades 3-5 teacher in search of an activity sheet on different fraction notations. A search in May 2022 on the popular resources sharing site TeachersPayTeachers (TpT) yielded 2,832 results, 105 of which were free. With so many options, how would you go about choosing a resource for your students? What would factor into your…

Integration of content areas allows students to deepen and transfer knowledge. An area that allows for an organic integration of STEM content is through combining mathematics with science instruction. This paper describes how we integrated a lesson coupling flower structure with data representation in a Year 3 classroom. The lesson occurred over…

Picture this: a PhD chemist, PhD science educator, and a preservice Latina elementary educator walk into an aftercare program for primary and intermediate students from a rural school. These students are identified as low income and at risk and therefore eligible to participate in this school-provided aftercare. While across the state, these same…

This article presents activities focused on developing some essential Year 1-3 fraction understandings (i.e., joining/composing, decomposing/ partitioning) while aligning these activities to the Australian Curriculum content strands and content descriptions. Additionally, the authors describe the materials/resources needed, the key vocabulary…

Representation in science is anything that stands for something else--drawings, pictures, graphs, or other representational forms (Danish et al. 2020). Representations serve as public displays of phenomena that make aspects of those phenomena explicit (Gilbert 2008). They can serve to make the invisible visible, communicate ideas, display…

English learners (ELs) benefit from inquiry-based science instruction that includes explicit attention to language learning goals. The purpose of this article is to share a third-grade unit on forces and motion which integrates science inquiry and writing in science notebooks with the goal of developing ELs' engagement in science, conceptual…

Young children's self-identification and self-identity are essentially a set of conscious and unconscious beliefs built from experiences. Students' self-image, and their understanding of society, can change when they research how women contributed to our nation and to our daily lives. Such lessons can render these historical figures accessible and…

The authors focused on using antiques to learn how to teach elementary children about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in a historical context; they refer to the historical objects as "antique artifacts." By studying antiques, students get a real-world opportunity to learn how people in their local area and beyond…